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With Opening Day just over a month away, there is more excitement in the air in Baltimore about the upcoming baseball season than there has been in a long time.

Many factors contribute to that excitement, namely manager Buck Showalter. What he did the last two months of the 2010 season for the birds and what President of Baseball Operations Andy MacPhail achieved over the offseason provided for positivity coming into this season.

Many solid veteran players were brought in to help teach, support and protect the many young studs the Orioles are relying upon to take the team back to the .500 mark, and back to respectability.

First baseman Derrek Lee, DH Vladimir Guerrero and potential closer Kevin Gregg are just a few of the names who will have a huge impact on the team this coming season. But the new guys, all of whom are good major league players, can't carry the team on their own.

Showalter will be relying on players such as catcher Matt Wieters and center fielder Adam Jones to grow into their sky-high potential, and fan favorites Nick Markakis (right field) and Brian Roberts (second baseman) will look to bounce back from a down year and increase production.

I know, I get it. The Giants weren't as bad as the Orioles. But if you think about it, the Orioles projected starting 2011 lineup looks very similar to the 2010 World Series championship San Francisco Giants' team.

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Luke Scott is fairly equivalent to Aubrey Huff at the plate, as is J.J. Hardy to Edgar Renteria (though Hardy is a better fielder and has higher potential at the plate).

If Wieters starts to find his grove at the plate this year, he'll not only be a very good-to-great defensive catcher, but a threat at the plate and depending on the numbers he puts up, could be pretty similar to Giants' catcher Buster Poser.

We all know Wieters and Posey both have potential, so it'll be fun to see how each of them grow throughout their career. Posey, however, has the obvious jump-start on Wieters.

Up and down the 2011 O's projected lineup, you can see the similarities to the 2010 Giants. The Giants had no superstar, no Teixeira or Longoria or Pujols hitting in the middle of their lineup. They also built a solid bench, giving them many options late in the game for pinch-running, pinch-hitting or defensive substitutions.

With the exception of Vlad Guerrero, the O's appear to be very much the same way. One through nine, the O's can hit.

I know that the patchwork-type lineup style doesn't work for every team that tries it every season, but it's food for thought and there's no reason the O's can't make it work.

But the linchpin for this club is the young starting rotation.

We all saw how the Giants made their run to becoming the best baseball team last season. It was their young, but experienced, pitching staff, anchored by two-time Cy Young award winner Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain.

Their young pitching is what pushed them through those five and seven game series, and allowed their hitters to not have to be so pressured to put up lopsided numbers against the likes of Roy Halladay, Derek Lowe and Cliff Lee in order to win (though they did tee-off of Lee in Game 1 of the World Series).

Pitching wins championships. The Giants were just the latest example of that. And if the O's young guns in their rotation can figure out how to pitch like the Giants staff, then they can bring back a championship to Charm City in the near future.

I'm not saying it will happen this year or even next, but once guys like Brian Matusz, Jake Arrieta and Brad Bergesen figure out how to succeed at the major league level, the rest of the AL better watch out.

Like the Giants, the Orioles have a very young starting staff with amazing potential. All they need to do is figure out how to harness it, which is easier said than done.

Five prospects that MacPhail likes to refer to as "The Cavalry" are being trusted with being able to help carry the O's back to being the golden franchise they once were.

It can be assumed that all of the pitchers—Matusz, Arrieta, Bergesen, Chris Tillman and Zach Britton—won't pan out and live up to their potential, but it also safe to assume that at least two or three of them will and provide either steady, dependable pitching work for years to come, or burst on to the scene and become as successful as fellow AL East aces Jon Lester, CC Sabathia and David Price have become.

Those five, along with the Orioles' rotation mainstay Jeremy Guthrie, can help provide the Orioles franchise with some great baseball in the years to come.

But like I've said, the success of the team all comes back to those players, because good pitching equals winning and right now, O's fans don't necessarily need a championship, just a winning season after 13 consecutive sub-.500 years.

The Orioles should look at the 2010 Giants as a model of a success.

If they do that and listen closely to the coaching of Showalter and all of the well-known baseball minds he brought in to help him coach this team, the Orioles should begin a steady rise to baseball prosperity.