I often think about a friend of mine who, in the shift of MASN to a different cable tier, lost his ability to watch the Orioles on a nightly basis and told me early in the season that he was basically just seeing social media highlights and commentary about the team.
“It seems like everything is always terrible, and then I look later and it turns out they won,” he told me. This was in May when the Orioles were looking like an absolute wagon as they sprinted to a 49-25 start and were beating all of the league’s best teams. That 17-5 win at Yankee Stadium on June 20 felt like it meant something extra.
Now it seems like a lot of things are actually terrible, and they’re not winning nearly as often. They now sit at 73-53, meaning they’re 24-28 in their last 52 games. And I’m just going to say it: This team makes me feel kind of dumb, and I don’t know what to do about it.
The Orioles of the first two-plus months of the season were absolutely as good as we remember. The pitching staff has fallen off significantly since then, mostly through injury but also through some dips in performance. At the plate, it has felt worse but is actually almost identical, statistically.
Orioles hitters had a .769 OPS, a 117 wRC+, and .330 wOBA — the stats I use most to evaluate the efficiency of an offense — through that June 20 win at Yankee Stadium, and in the two months since, have a .768 OPS, a 118 wRC+, and a .332 wOBA as a club. They scored 5.27 runs per game through June 20, and 4.67 per game since. That’s mostly down to worse outcomes in high-leverage situations and with runners in scoring position; there’s not a ton different in those two stretches in terms of strikeouts or quality of contact for the club as a whole.
It feels different because there have been ebbs and flows in terms of who is producing and when. As Adley Rutschman has fallen off and Gunnar Henderson has gone from producing at an elite level to simply a really good one, and the power from Ryan Mountcastle and Ryan O’Hearn has dried up, Anthony Santander, Cedric Mullins, and Ramon Urias have trended up to varying degrees.
So, as the Orioles have faltered a bit in these last two months, they’re still eighth in the league in runs scored and tied for sixth in wRC+. The outcomes of the games have been different because the team’s ERA was 3.13 on June 20, and is 5.14 since. That’s two full runs per game more, and crucially, more than they’ve scored in that period.
The gulf in expected stats isn’t as wide. Their fielding-independent pitching, which calculates ERA based on walks, strikeouts and home runs, was 3.57 through June 20 and is 4.36 since. By xFIP, which substitutes a league-average home run rate for the actual one to further filter out noise, it was 4.00 through June 20 and is at 4.15 since, suggesting both that the early-season results were a bit fortunate and the struggles since so many top pitchers went down might have some bad luck mixed in and aren’t as bad as they seem.
Put all that together and there’s plenty of reason to subscribe to the idea that since last year’s 101-win team got to the postseason and basically got baseball-ed out in a blink — sometimes, this game is just inexplicable like that — it’s just as likely that the opposite could occur this year. A team that appears by some measures to be struggling will have its luck turn.
The October playoff scheduling means teams can condense their pitching staff and use their best arms more often, and there’s not as much fundamentally wrong with the offense as it seems. You don’t want to spend four months playing subpar baseball entering the playoffs, but form isn’t always relevant once the postseason begins.
And I’m just going to say it again: This line of thinking kind of makes me feel dumb. I don’t want to be some happy clapper over here. I just feel like there are a lot of reasons why this is a really good team still, even though there’s not a lot of evidence on a nightly basis that matches that conviction level.
On a macro level, though, there’s less to support that this team is really flailing than the results of the last two months suggest. Maybe it all evens out or swings back their way in October, or maybe the next injury is the one that finally does them in. I’m just ready to stop wondering if I have lost grip with reality where this team is concerned.
Ballpark chatter
“I think this level is harder than anyone ever thinks. It’s really, really normal to go through early struggles. It’s more normal than not.”
– Brandon Hyde on Coby Mayo’s debut
There’s no emptier discourse than so-and-so needs time, or so-and-so isn’t ready, to say nothing of the after-the-fact gloating if a player who struggles early ultimately becomes good or vice versa. I can comfortably say that because my Mayo take falls outside that universe.
It is as follows: there’s nothing you can learn about a player in that short of a sample, so its value really comes down to what he takes from it. Anyone who has followed his climb to the majors and knows his strengths or weaknesses knows he’s going to destroy anything he can turn on, and is challenged by outer-half channeling, though he’s improved on that a great deal as he’s developed. It’s not as if he hasn’t worked on it, daily, for his entire pro career. Now he just knows the level to which he’ll have to be able to defend against it, and that’s a good thing.
📫 Have a question? Write to me here.
Talent pipeline
Alex Pham was a breakout pitcher on the Orioles’ farm last year, but the 24-year-old right-hander got off to a rough start at Double-A Bowie this year. He had a 6.87 ERA and 1.50 WHIP in his first nine starts, but in his next 14 outings, Pham has a 3.13 ERA, a 1.089 WHIP, and 76 strikeouts in 63⅓ innings. The 2021 19th-round pick made two starts last week in Altoona, striking out nine and allowing two runs on six hits over 12 total innings.
By the numbers
96.4
A few weeks ago, we noted in this space that Burch Smith had added a few ticks to his fastball after spending some time at Triple-A Norfolk and eventually joining the Orioles’ bullpen. It’s even earlier to note this, but right-hander Colin Selby has done the same. He averaged 94.4 mph on his sinker in two early-season outings with Kansas City, but was up to 96.4 mph Monday, with his entire arsenal harder than it was before. His sinker also moved like crazy. These types of finds are vital for the Orioles at this point, and they may have made another one.
📖 For further reading
🏟️ Sitting with the fans: This was a fun story from Danielle about Mike Elias taking in the Orioles’ games from the stands. I think fun is relative in his role, but it’s probably much more fun to watch among the fans now than it was a few years ago. (The Baltimore Banner)
⚾ The draft pick: Andy’s profile of Vance Honeycutt is a good one. There’s a certain archetype of players the Orioles are leaning toward in drafts lately, and if they start turning them into big leaguers, it’s going to be fun to watch. (The Baltimore Banner)
🕯️ Remembering a neighbor: I can’t say enough kind things about my old neighbor in Fells Point, Dave, whose death I was not expecting to read about this week. We were just back in the area Friday for lunch and I strolled up past my old place with our baby while my wife looked around Greedy Reads, mostly hoping I’d run into Dave and get to introduce him to Milo. He was a warm, incredibly helpful person and was always looking out for the neighborhood. He will be missed. (The Baltimore Banner)
