If there were a simple solution, we’d probably have seen it already. It’s certainly not what we’re hearing about, though.
The longer the Orioles have remained in this offensive funk they’re falling into, particularly in run-scoring situations, the more serious it’s become. This team is running a real risk of going into the playoffs playing 100 games’ worth of .500 baseball, and just because no one in the AL is particularly hot right now doesn’t make that feel any better.
Their battered pitching staff has for the most part stabilized. This is on the offense of late, and the stream of postgame commentary from Orioles players and coaches about needing to put the ball in play with runners on felt more alarming than the results themselves.
Of course, when the Orioles strike out four times with runners in scoring position in the final two innings, it’s easy to say they need to shorten up their swings and put the ball in play to get a run across. That’s retrofitting an action to the desired outcome, though. And that’s not what this team is built to do.
The Orioles don’t need to start trying to scoop singles over the infield like Cedric Mullins did late or stick the bat over the plate and just hope something good happens like a 12-year-old me did. This is a lineup that’s been built to and trained to seek damage — hard, elevated contact on pitches over the heart of the plate, pitches that opposing arms are forced to throw because of the Orioles’ emphasis that encourages them not to swing at pitches they can’t hit hard in the air.
When the Orioles offense has been at its best in the last two years, it has moved the line, yes. But no one has been up there looking to do anything but drive the ball. And I really hope all the postgame chatter Sunday was as empty as, well, most things said after baseball games.
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It’s an incredibly nice thing to say — that we’re not going to strike out with runners in scoring position and things will turn around. And it’s an incredibly headstrong, unreasonable thing for anyone in uniform for the Orioles to answer for this deteriorating offense in any kind of defiant manner, so allow me to. If this team is going to get back to its best form on offense, it is not going to get there by changing how it goes about things in September.
One of the joys and curses of this Orioles season has been the sheer volume of events to measure things from: Kyle Bradish’s exit against the Phillies, Adley Rutschman’s late-June foul ball off his hand, Jordan Westburg’s late-July injury, and the list goes on. Manager Brandon Hyde used the All-Star break Sunday, so for the purposes of this discussion we’ll go with that. (And I do so acknowledging the Orioles have been worse lately than they were at any point in August).
In that time, the Orioles are batting .260 with a .317 wOBA with runners in scoring position, which entering Sunday ranked 11th and 17th in the league. Their strikeout rate of 23.6% was 15th, and they whiffed on 24.4% of swings, which was 10th best in the league. Overall, since the break, they aren’t meaningfully under- or outperforming their runners-in-scoring-position production in any category, so it’s not as if they’re doing anything differently in these at-bats over the course of these seven-plus weeks.
When the Orioles do make contact with runners in scoring position, it’s arguable that they actually don’t do enough damage. They entered Sunday with a .571 slugging percentage on balls in play with runners in scoring position since the break, outperforming their expected .550 slugging percentage in such situations. Those rank 14th and 12th in the league, respectively, and if you split the difference you end up around the .561 actual and .562 expected slugging percentage the team has overall since the break.
If you’re sensing a pattern, it’s that a lot of things about the Orioles offense have been middle of the pack in this span. That’s manifested itself on the field in extremely productive stretches and quite fallow ones, which has made it feel at times not as bad as and worse than it is in reality.
No amount of contact will change that. The Orioles aren’t going to turn into the Guardians overnight. They probably know that. They just need to be better at what they do, which is to get pitchers to come back over the plate and make them regret it because of the ensuing hard contact. Anything else feels difficult to achieve at this point for no other reason than there are nine hitters in the lineup each night and now five more on the bench, and few if any of them are defined by simply putting the ball in play.
Anthony Santander, who said after the game that he tries to follow that approach, certainly was not when he tomahawked a go-ahead grand slam a few weeks ago in a big spot against the Astros. Gunnar Henderson has one of the hardest swings in the league and is one of five Orioles regulars above the league average in MLB’s recently released swing-tracking data in terms of swing speed.
This is a damage-oriented team, which works well when it’s working. It’s felt like it hasn’t worked consistently in a while, and when it doesn’t work with runners in scoring position, it feels incredibly frustrating — for the same reason both inside the Orioles’ clubhouse and outside it.
When there’s an opportunity to put runs on the board, you either do or you don’t. The reason an expectation exists around so many of these Orioles hitters that they should produce in such situations is that they’re really good ones, and not because they put the ball in play but because the quality of contact is so high that good things happen when they do.
Building an offense like that is done with the knowledge that, over time, it will produce, even if there’s volatility. This is one of those times when that volatility feels more acute. And it still feels like a circumstance when change in pursuit of reversing that is going to create more problems than it can potentially solve.
