Trust me: Treading water is better than sinking. It’s hard work, and it’s no guarantee you won’t sink eventually.
But, as we wait for this Orioles team to kick on and start playing like a playoff team, a 3-3 homestand with green shoots starting to pop up might just be enough to keep this team afloat.
That’s unfortunately what’s on the horizon for this team right now. The Orioles need to stack wins: winning streaks, series wins, winning weeks, winning months. And they need to do so fast. But as they seek those and build up the total in their win column to help claw back to .500 and beyond, it’s inevitable that there will be losses mixed in.
Some — hopefully few — will be like Tuesday’s bloodbath at the hands of the Yankees. Others will be like this weekend’s frustrating but not overall dispiriting losses to the Royals.
The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.
Yet, given what we’ve seen so far, every loss is going to erase whatever goodwill came before it. Absent a winning streak that erases this early deficit they’ve dug themselves in the standings in one big bite, any stretch where the Orioles aren’t falling further behind needs to be viewed as one they’d begrudgingly take.
Now you don’t get to lose as often and as badly as the Orioles did in April and then start benefiting when the bar is lowered. There have been and will continue to be recriminations and judgments as to why that happened, and those will be made through the lens of a team that should be in its peak window of contention. None of that has changed.
Neither can what has already happened. Those losses are already banked. It’s now about seeing a few things. One is improvements, or signs of them, and I think this week at Camden Yards a few jumped out.
One is the production of the team’s superstars. Gunnar Henderson came home with a .634 OPS after the team’s tough road trip and heads back on the road at .733 — nearly 100 points higher — after he went 9-for-22 with three extra-base hits and, most important, just four strikeouts. Adley Rutschman is a lot like the team itself as he appears to be getting better but isn’t seeing a huge spike in the overall numbers. That said, the underlying data suggests better is ahead.
Another thing that needs to be demonstrated at this point is the acknowledgment that things need to improve. We’ve seen this with Charlie Morton moving to the bullpen and some lineups that attempt to keep as many of the team’s best hitters in even if the opposing stater doesn’t match up with their ideal usage.
The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.
Not all of their right-handed hitters can possibly go on hitting lefties as poorly as they have for an entire season, but to fill half a lineup with those underperformers every chance the Orioles got was a recipe for disaster that they’ve at least started to go off script for.
Another is the relative stabilization of the rotation. Kyle Gibson’s Tuesday disaster notwithstanding, every Orioles starter this week — including him on Sunday — gave the team a chance to win. They were 3-2 in such games.
Zach Eflin seemed to think he’d need only Sunday in Aberdeen before returning to the rotation, and at this point the Orioles aren’t really in a position to say no to him. And, given Tomoyuki Sugano seems like he’s as advertised, Gibson was better Sunday and April Dean Kremer is behind us, that’s overall a group you can win games with.
And Eflin’s return speaks to another aspect of this team that can’t be overlooked, even in a week when another contributor in Ramón Urías ended up on the injured list: It’s going to get healthy soon.
Eflin is one of the more significant short-term absentees the Orioles have at this point, and his return to the rotation will be a welcome one. Andrew Kittredge is going to make a good bullpen better once he’s back.
The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.
If the week-plus off helps Jordan Westburg and Tyler O’Neill get back to their best selves, the lineup will be immediately better. And before long we’ll get to the part where Colton Cowser and maybe Grayson Rodriguez are back, too.
That’s why treading water matters. If the Orioles are still seven games under .500 on Memorial Day, which would put them at 23-30, this tune will probably change. But the first order of business is not to let things get worse.
If this gets worse, that’s when we start talking about jobs being on the line. If things devolve from here, the viability of nearly seven years of work to rebuild this organization comes into question. And, because of how baseball and the discourse around it work, the idea that this contending window is closing could become pervasive.
Gibson was right in saying after his disastrous debut Tuesday that it wasn’t going to happen all at once, that the team’s climb back from as bad a start as one could imagine would take a while. The first step toward that is not falling any further back.
That could mean weekends when no one is particularly buzzing about this team. Nothing wrong with that. There’s no celebrating stasis. I’m just here acknowledging that there’s value to not falling further behind, because the alternative at this early stage is much, much worse.
