In salvaging a series split this weekend against the surging Astros, the Orioles dusted off one of their best traits: keeping it close until they could strike the massive offensive blow in the late innings.

And that felt kind of fitting. As the Orioles’ stop-start summer trudges on, every point of evidence available suggests they’re not going to change anything about how they approach and try to win each game. Perhaps there will be a time for that. The processes they’re sticking to now were honed long before the team had such high expectations, and are what in many ways helped them earn those expectations with best-in-class results all through 2023 and the first two-plus months of 2024.

Honestly, it would feel worse if they changed course at this point in the season. The Orioles were and, I believe, still are convinced that they have invested in the best way to do things. Two months of .500 baseball being a catalyst to change things up would be more of a concern to me than those two months themselves.

It’s been over a decade since trusting the process became a stand-in for allowing a team to tank in the interest of a better future, which certainly happened here, but as the Orioles were doing so, they spent a lot of time trying to build an actual and philosophical infrastructure for how they’d do things. That applied to everything from roster construction and player development to in-game decisions and player instruction.

A few aspects of the day-to-day processes have come to mind recently. When I spoke to manager Brandon Hyde a few falls ago for a story on his second-place finish for AL Manager of the Year, he said the processes that led to the 2022 Orioles having a high-functioning, high-performing bullpen were largely the same that underpinned the more, well, challenged Orioles pitching staffs before them.

It goes something like this: Armed with as much information as possible about their opponents, their own pitchers’ capabilities, and who is available each night, Hyde and his staff map out the best potential spots and scenarios to deploy that night’s relief arms. This is much easier when you have multiple All-Star-caliber relievers in the back-end of your bullpen, but it was refined through years of not having those kinds of pitchers available on a nightly basis.

Nothing that happens in the course of a game is done flippantly. It’s just that when you have three and sometimes four relievers who are trusted and can be deployed in various spots a night, chances are the outcomes will be better than when one or two pitchers might fit that mold. So, to be OK with the way the Orioles navigated late-game instances when Hyde could call on a healthy Félix Bautista, a pre-trade Jorge López, or high-level lefties Cionel Pérez and Danny Coulombe is largely to be OK with the way the Orioles deploy the available pitchers now.

No one is going to pump their chest at the results over the last two months. It’s just that the instances where it works and the instances that leave everyone frustrated stem from the same ideas.

Hitting strategy coach Cody Asche indicated that a similar focus on process has been in place as performance has waned a bit at the plate.

“From an outsider’s perspective, there’s been some ups and downs, but from the internal room, you wouldn’t know it by our guys because they’re just so committed to the process of what we do, every single day,” Asche said. “We’re not worried about yesterday’s problems for today. We’re worried about what today’s challenges are, and I think that’s why we’ve had so much success. When you look at this season as a whole, rather than a smaller blip on the radar of the last couple weeks, our group is really amazing at that sense. We turn the page quick.”

In a lot of ways, that’s true. There are outlier weeks, like the one the Orioles offense just had with a .583 OPS and 66 wRC+ (with 100 being league-average). But you have to go back another five weeks — during which time their wRC+ was 112, 106, 155, 102 and 149 — before you get to another well-below-average week. Then, there were six weeks vacillating between modestly above-average and significantly so. That doesn’t account for situational success that leads to runs, but the hitting department believes keeping a consistent approach in those high-leverage moments will lead to results over time.

That’s part of what they ask players to focus on.

“Every single day, they’re ready to prepare and they just love to prepare,” Asche said. “They love the challenges of today. They love to win, and the guys are just working incredibly hard.”

He said the simplicity of the process allows it to be successful in spells that might feel challenging otherwise.

“I think what we do allows us to dumb things down and make it simple and make it digestible, and I think that’s just the hallmark of any really good team … whether it’s the NBA, NHL, NFL,” Asche said. “When you’re giving a consistent message any day, it doesn’t turn into wins and losses. It just turns into, ‘Here’s what the challenge is today, let’s go get it.’”