Brach back from arbitration hearing and ready to resume routine

SARASOTA, Fla. - Orioles reliever Brad Brach should find out early this afternoon whether he won or lost his arbitration hearing. He only knows now that there is no animosity and both sides are ready to move on from the process.

Brach returned to Sarasota yesterday around 3:30 p.m. and did some throwing to work up a sweat. Back to business as usual.

"It's kind of like a rollercoaster," he said. "When we said our case, it was great, and then when they said theirs, I thought we were going to lose. I don't know. We'll see.

"It wasn't as bad as we were expecting it to be. It's not like they sit there and bash you for an hour long. They just bring up, it seemed like now it was a lot of metrics. so it was a lot of stuff I don't understand. We'll see today.

"I can understand you taking it personally, but nobody from the team has said anything. I didn't say anything. You just kind of sit there and you just have to understand that it's not personal. And if you take it personal, I can see how you can get mad and it could affect you, but you just have to go in knowing that it's not a personal thing."

Glenn Wong, who serves as an outside counsel for the Orioles, handled the team's case. H. Russell Smouse retired with an 8-0 record in hearings.

Brach's side noted his 10-4 record, 2.05 ERA, 1.038 WHIP and first All-Star selection, among other positive attributes.

"It's a lot of just numbers and the metric stuff that I don't really understand, salary raise-type stuff," he said. "It's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily my stats versus theirs. They try to compare it any way they can to try and make it so I don't get the raise I'm asking for.

"The last two nights it's just been tough with sleep. I wasn't nervous about it. I just wanted it to be done with. After we went through everything yesterday, I just want to see how we did, basically. Nobody likes to lose. Hopefully, I get some good news here."

Brach is getting a raise no matter the result. He made $1.250 million last season and will receive $3.05 million or $2.525 million.

"Like I said the other day, I'm extremely lucky to play this game and I get paid a really good salary to play," he said. "We all do, and I think if I was going be mad over the difference, I shouldn't be playing. I should be doing something else. That's just the way I look at it."

The Orioles made one final attempt to reach agreement before the hearing.

"We never really got close enough to the point where I was thinking about it just because I had a number set in my head," Brach said. "We just were never able to get to that number. I knew going into it what the process involves and I was just willing to go. If there's a year to go, being an All-Star like I was last year and having the numbers I thought I put up, I figured it was a good year to go."

Brach said he didn't talk to manager Buck Showalter about the hearing. No one checked on his mental state.

"If they were worried about me, I think they might have said something," he said. "I understood the process going in. Pretty much it was exactly what I thought was going to happen. They're going to look at the stats one way; we're going to look at the stats the other way. Someone is going to come out as the victor, I guess you could say."