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ARLINGTON, Texas — There’s no feeling good about this. When it comes to playoff baseball, there’s also only so much you can do about it.
The Orioles’ magical season, which featured 101 wins and launched an undeniable baseball renaissance in Baltimore, ended Tuesday as the Texas Rangers swept the Orioles with a 7-1 win at Globe Life Field. An Orioles team that outplayed everyone on its way to being the class of the American League during the regular season was overwhelmed by a Rangers team that has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to its core of stars.
If the Orioles had won, then their measured approach to rebuilding this club into a contender would be lauded. Because they didn’t — and now have first-hand experience of how volatile the playoffs can be — it’s worth wondering how much the top brass will tweak its vision going forward.
No one is going to look at what the Orioles accomplished this year and decide the template that helped them get here is broken, least of all Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal or Eve Rosenbaum at the highest levels of the Orioles’ front office.
Nor should they. They are doing what they believe is best, have built a contender the hard way, and have depth to layer on top of their talented core and make it better. After nearly five years, we know the following about them: They believe in drafting and developing young talent, both because they have a deep faith in their development apparatus to get the most out of the players and because they also cost less than veterans. We know they strictly adhere to a projection and valuation model that forecasts what players will do and how much it is worth in salary. We know they promised an elite talent pipeline, delivered on it, and are confident in what it has and will produce.
They will also have these three games at the front of their mind, a small, painful sample to tell them sustainability and success in the postseason aren’t the same thing.
Elias’ peer in Seattle, Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto, admitted earlier this month that he was embarrassed with his characterization that Seattle was “actually doing the fanbase a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster,” noting that teams that won 54% of their games over a 10-year period “more often than not” end up in the World Series at some point.
He was trying to combat the idea of going all-in to make the playoffs in a given year — and the logic behind that is sound in many ways. MLB’s playoff structure will rarely, if ever, fairly reward the best regular season teams or even resemble the six-month crucible it takes to reach the postseason. Case in point: the champions of the daunting AL East being swept by a talented Rangers team that got hot when it mattered at the end of the season.
You build a roster that can win enough to get into the playoffs and see what happens. What happened this time around with the Orioles was some combination of baseball being a fickle game and the Orioles not steeling themselves against that reality.
Of course the team that often won close and late didn’t in Game 1. Of course a lineup that relied on a patient approach and didn’t hit a ton of home runs found stringing together a rally challenging when the stakes are higher. Of course a young rotation that defied expectations all season struggled in the playoffs. Of course the team that didn’t get swept for a year and a half was swept in a three-game playoff series.
The Orioles could have helped themselves out more than they did. They were 7 1/2 games up on the last wild-card team at the Aug. 1 trade deadline; it would have taken a significant collapse to miss the playoffs. Perhaps it was with that in mind that the Orioles’ only additions leading up to it were mercurial reliever Shintaro Fujinami and the last rental starter left on the market, Jack Flaherty.
Neither made a meaningful impact on the team, though that was kind of the point. The Orioles held on to all of their top prospects at the deadline, and would have needed to include some of them to fetch any kind of impact pitcher. They chose to, essentially, add depth at a reasonable price so as not to diminish the chances of future Orioles teams being in the same position this one was: playing October baseball with a chance at a championship.
Those decisions came back to haunt them in the last week when John Means’ elbow started barking in the week leading up to the ALDS, removing him from the rotation mix. They chose not to replace him with a starter on a playoff roster that didn’t feature Fujinami at all, and the knock-on impact of that occurred when Bryan Baker and Jacob Webb turned Sunday’s Game 2 into a laugher early.
These are the decisions baseball executives have to make every year. Sometimes, you stand pat. Sometimes, you trade the farm for Justin Verlander and win the World Series. Sometimes, you trade for Lucas Giolito, play terrible baseball for a month and then put him on waivers.
In this specific instance, the Orioles made a pair of value plays, trading prospects who weren’t part of their future for pitchers who weren’t ultimately a meaningful part of their playoff staff. The free agent pitcher they signed in the winter, Kyle Gibson, was additive to everything they did this season but was relegated to successful mop-up duty in Game 3. They traded for Cole Irvin as rotation depth, and he wasn’t on the postseason roster either.
They were all moves that were designed to help the Orioles and their young pitching staff manage a full season and get to the playoffs. None ultimately made a difference in helping them win once those playoffs arrived.
It turns out to win in October you simply need as many good hitters and pitchers as possible. Everything the Orioles have done over these last five years has been with that goal in mind. Same with this Rangers club that beat them. Their way of doing that was paying market-value for playoff-proven free agents, all of whom came up big and eased the load for a young core that played loose and quite well in this series.
That’s never going to be the Orioles’ formula. Following Texas’ fails more than it flourishes, too. The only way to win in the playoffs is to pitch well, collect timely hits and limit mistakes. Young, inexpensive players can do that the same way well-paid veterans can.
You just never know how October baseball is going to play out. The random nature of postseason baseball probably frustrates a baseball operations department that simply wants to make the best decisions possible with all the available information.
Elias and his staff can take the information gleaned in the last three games to add a front-line starter to ease the pressure on a talented but inexperienced returning rotation, sign a one-year Félix Bautista replacement, and use their prospect depth and major league talent to upgrade the roster elsewhere.
Or, they can run it back with the same group under the same basic philosophy and hope to be the team that gets hot in October. The latter feels more likely, given what we know about them.
jon.meoli@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Jon Meoli is the Baltimore Banner's Orioles columnist and head women's ice hockey coach at Loyola University Maryland.
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