



BALTIMORE – The Buck Showalter Revenge Tour 2012 will continue here Sunday night, in front of a stadium filled with people who have waited 15 years for such an evening. Buck, of course, is not the main attraction. His Baltimore Orioles, the fourth team he has managed as if with Midas' mitts, are back in the postseason, ready to dispose of the New York Yankees much like they have every other impediment.

The first was their own history, littered with failure, which the Orioles forgot. The next was their own fallibility, what with a far less-talented roster than their opponents, which the Orioles never bothered to acknowledge. And then was their wild-card play-in game, against the Texas Rangers, which the Orioles took care of in resounding fashion Friday night, the first leg of Showalter's payback voyage.

He doesn't look at it that way, of course, because Buck Showalter is above all a pragmatist, and anything that deviates from goal, deed and duty is little more than noise. Never mind that his entire baseball life has followed the good-but-not-good-enough template that's the seedling to vengeance or that the years of mistreatment, doubts and unwarranted kicks to the curb may well deserve a referendum.

"I've been past that," Showalter said. "I have. Everything is for a reason. I've been past it."

This much is certain: He does not seek vengeance even if privately he might relish it. Beating the Rangers, the team that fired him after he took them to the cusp of their current state? Well, it would be cold if it hadn't happened twice before, with the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Yankees first. Showalter is like Bain Capital, only he never got to partake of the spoils.

[Related: Josh Hamilton's likely farewell to Rangers ends with trail of boos]

And so this right now, this magical Orioles team of misfits and castoffs and has-beens and never-weres – this is the team for which Buck Showalter was made and that Orioles general manager Dan Duquette made in his image. One of kindred spirits, many of whom were cast aside, too.

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"Inside, we all feel like that in here," said Nate McLouth, dumped by the Braves last year, then the Pirates this year, only to resurrect his career down the stretch with Baltimore. It's him and Lew Ford and Miguel Gonzalez and Steve Johnson and Joe Saunders and half the Orioles' roster, this compendium of D-list ballplayers who find a little something extra in Baltimore.

One of baseball's great questions, of course, is whether a manager should be viewed through the prism of causation or correlation. It would seem one instance screams for correlation, two shows a little something different, three edges toward the opposite and four is either two decades of blind stupid luck by Showalter or the sort of cause-and-effect that leads to tangible change in culture, accountability, knowledge and so many of the things on which he prides himself.

"I kind of noticed this right when I got here," McLouth said. "He's the kind of guy who even when he's not looking at you, he's watching you. He knows what's going on. All the time. Everywhere."

And yet the Orioles swear Showalter's reputation of being "a hard-nosed, really intolerant-to-messing-around kind of manager," starter Joe Saunders said, "isn't true. I come here and he's a down-to-earth, laid-back, personable guy. With a pingpong table in the clubhouse."

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