The Baltimore Orioles are American League East champions for the first time since 1997, and that’s not all they have accomplished under Dan Duquette, their chief baseball executive.

In his three years in that position – don’t dare call him general manager because the team’s principal owner, Peter Angelos detests that title and becomes irate if anyone uses it in relation to the Orioles but more about that later – Duquette has headed the once glorious but fallen Orioles back toward their many years of glory.

The Orioles have attained winning records in each of Duquette’s three seasons. The franchise had gone through eight – excuse the expression – general managers since the last time it had three full seasons with more wins than losses. The Orioles didn’t even achieve a three-year winning streak in the three-year term of Hall of Famer Pat Gillick.

Angelos, who won the Orioles in a 1993 bankruptcy auction, has gone through nine general manager types, one before Gillick and six more between Gillick and Duquette.

The last general manager to oversee three consecutive winning 162-game seasons was …

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There is no doubt in my mind or most likely in anyone else’s, even Brian Cashman’s, that if George Steinbrenner were alive and running the Yankees, he would have fired Cashman by now. And if not by now, tomorrow.

Cashman has benefited more from Steinbrenner’s demise than anyone else I can think of. I’m sure he knows it, too, though he declined, by his failure to return telephone calls, to discuss it.

“Let me check for you,” the general manager’s secretary said when I called Monday, then came back a minute later and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Chass, I couldn’t locate him.”

The first thing a secretary learns is to …

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Only a few weeks ago the Oakland Athletics and the Milwaukee Brewers could have justifiably begun making post-season plans that didn’t include cruises on the Mediterranean and hunting in Montana. Baseball games in October would have been the idea.

Now the Athletics and the Brewers are in jeopardy of not even gaining wild-card spots in the playoffs, the perilous pleasure of potentially playing one game and going home.

The Detroit Tigers face a similar quandary, though they seem to have short-circuited their tailspin and have at least a fighting chance to win the division title that had been conceded to them before the season began.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, meanwhile, were doing their utmost to justify their general manager’s cautionary concern that he expressed two weeks ago, before the San Francisco Giants slashed the Dodgers’ lead over them from …

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