Rarely has a 2-5 stretch felt like such a harbinger of doom.
The Orioles did not lose every game over the past week. Their position in the standings did not change drastically. But the combination of Zach Eflin’s injury and two walk-off losses to the New York Mets demoralized a fan base that was already teetering.
Here are five things we learned amid the gloom.
The Orioles of the first 2 1/2 months are gone, and there’s no easy fix to bring them back
Perspective is essential to rational baseball fandom. The sample sizes are rarely large enough for us to claim anything like true understanding. Thus, it made sense to shrug off the Orioles’ 11-13 July. How much did it really say about a club that was the best in baseball as of June 20?
Two months of malaise — there’s really no better word for the Orioles 25-30 record since June 21 — feels different. That’s losing baseball, fully supported by the team’s minus-39 run differential over the span, for one-third of the season. We can talk about the inevitable comedown from their stellar record in one-run games last season, but this is more than bad luck.
And the more disheartening reality is there’s no cavalry massing for a prompt rescue.
Yes, there’s hope the Orioles — still in excellent position to make the playoffs — will be a better team come October with Eflin and Grayson Rodriguez back in the rotation, Danny Coulombe handling the seventh inning and Jordan Westburg slashing timely hits. In this era of baseball, when the goal is less to dominate for six months than to get hot for one, maybe they’ll catch lightning.
But that flavor of optimism feels disconnected from the club’s current reality. It’s difficult to find the good vibes when your injured list rotation is far more impressive than your active one, when the bullpen is a nightly horror flick, when several of your foundational guys have become banjo hitters in the heat of summer.
There’s no grand move to make.
The Orioles have already called up baseball’s best prospect, Jackson Holliday. Minor league slugger Coby Mayo could not help and was quickly dispatched back to Norfolk. There’s no equivalent pitching gem queued up for the trip to Baltimore.
General manager Mike Elias cast a wide net at the trade deadline, but with Eflin’s shoulder hurting and Eloy Jiménez drilling balls into the ground rather than over the fence, none of his additions are righting the ship.
The Orioles have been adrift since that feverish June peak, and it’s all too easy to imagine them staying adrift for at least another month.
Brandon Hyde cannot trust a single one of his relievers
That was how Hyde described his daily quest to secure wins after he watched closer-of-the-moment Seranthony Domínguez serve up a second walk-off home run in three days Wednesday afternoon in New York.
You won’t hear more plaintive words from a grizzled baseball man.
As we’ve discussed in this space, second-guessing Hyde’s bullpen management is popular sport among Orioles fans. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.
But we’re beyond that. This is a man trying to plug leaks with a bag of ill-fitting, misshapen tools. He deserves our sympathy, not our derision.
Start with Domínguez, whose stuff pops the mitt but whose fatal flaw in Philadelphia was his propensity to surrender big flies. He tantalized with eight scoreless appearances in his first nine Orioles outings, but he has given up a home run in each of his past three, pushing his season rate to 1.9 per nine innings. That’s untenable for a closer, or anyone else.
That said, his ballad is downright cheerful compared with that of Craig Kimbrel, who’s enduring the worst stretch of a career that could land him in the Hall of Fame. Kimbrel’s command has erred for more than a month, and he’s compensating by throwing fat pitches that opponents are driving over the fence. As Hyde said recently, there’s nothing to do but give the veteran chances to sort himself out. Kimbrel has done it before, but the Orioles no longer seem certain he will find the light at the end of this tunnel. “It’s up to him,” Hyde said.
Go down the list and there’s not a sure thing to be found.
Yennier Cano’s solid 2.86 ERA belies increased home run and walk rates. He’s still good more often than not but no longer the safe bridge to the ninth inning he was in 2023.
Cionel Pérez keeps the ball mercifully in the park, but his command comes and goes.
Keegan Akin has been a workhorse, but he’s still prone to get hit hard once every five or six outings despite his exemplary strikeout rate.
Gregory Soto, the other trade deadline addition, has actually pitched four straight scoreless outings, but his line for the season remains ghastly.
If Coulombe and Jacob Webb make it back, does Hyde have some hope of cobbling a workable postseason quartet from this crew? Perhaps, but there are so many fatal flaws at play that he’s going to stare at a minefield every night.
The solution to an epidemic of shattered arms will remain elusive
Of course, fans want to know why so many Orioles pitchers are hurt. It’s human nature. If we could pinpoint some fatal flaw in pitching coach Drew French’s method, it could simply be repaired like a frayed ligament.
But our local woes are really just a symptom of the epidemic plaguing modern baseball at all levels. Every club walks the same tightrope every year. Clusters of misery such as the one the Orioles are experiencing with Eflin, Rodriguez, Kyle Bradish, John Means, etc. are inevitable in this climate.
In his excellent 2016 book “The Arm,” Jeff Passan casually noted the dispiriting truth that more than half of pitchers end up on the injured list every season.
“The problem is not going away,” Passan wrote at the time. “The sport’s foremost doctors believe it’s worsening. The current generation of pitchers is lost, the product of a broken system, their arms ticking time bombs.”
Prescient words to say the least.
The Orioles pitchers currently on the injured list are part of that “lost” generation. Talk to smart people around the sport and you’ll hear broad agreement that young pitchers overtax their arms by chasing greater spin rates and velocity at younger and younger ages. It’s the way they get noticed, and as such, the sport has trapped itself in a destructive cycle with no collective will to escape it.
No doubt the Orioles are devoting some of their considerable analytical muscle to this problem. A club that could significantly reduce pitcher wear and tear would hold the ultimate competitive advantage. And still, no one has cracked the code.
Though the problem has accelerated, pitchers always suffered significant injuries at alarming rates. The game’s history is littered with would-be prodigies whose arms did not hold up to the strain. Even most Hall of Fame pitchers dealt with shoulder or elbow woes at some point. Sandy Koufax retired in agony at age 30. We remember Nolan Ryan not because he was emblematic of a healthier age, but because he was always a one-of-one freak.
All the context in the world doesn’t make it any easier to watch the Orioles struggle along with a ravaged rotation. But they’re not special.
Dean Kremer has given the rotation badly needed stability
When puzzling out the Orioles’ potential playoff starters, we often forget to say Kremer was a solid No. 4 in 2022 and 2023 if judged on his total body of work.
He has pitched unevenly in 2024, struggling to string together good starts, giving up too many home runs (1.4 per nine innings) and throwing his four-seam fastball and cutter slower than he did last season.
With so much bad news around him, however, Kremer has offered the Orioles a lifeline over his past two starts, winning both and striking out 10 while allowing just seven hits in 12 innings. He and Albert Suárez are the men of the moment as the Orioles pray that Eflin’s shoulder inflammation isn’t serious and that Corbin Burnes will return to every-start excellence.
Kremer’s inconsistency masks the fact he has allowed less hard contact this year while striking out a career-best 8.5 batters per nine innings. He relies less on that four-seamer, and his walk rate has climbed each of the past two seasons, but he’s finding a workable formula.
“I was competitive with my sinker and splitter today, and that kind of got me through,” he said after beating the Mets on Tuesday.
Perhaps Kremer is destined to be taken for granted when things are going well for the Orioles and the flashier pitchers ahead of him in the rotation. With the club in survival mode, however, he could be one of its most important members over the next month.
Where have you gone, Adley Rutschman?
It’s not a conversation anyone wants to have about the All-Star catcher who was the seed of the Orioles’ renaissance, but Rutschman has become a shocking black hole in the lineup over the past two months with a .265 on-base percentage and just eight extra-base hits since the beginning of July.
His OPS+, an easy measure of hitting performance relative to the league, has plummeted from 120 in the first half to 68 in the second. Even taking into account his stronger early performance, he’s slugging .366 against right-handed pitchers this year, down from .419 in 2023. His walk rate is down sharply, and he’s swinging and missing more frequently.
In sum, we’re not seeing the combination of power and plate discipline that made Rutschman the sport’s top prospect in 2022. Why these steps back from a guy who should be in his prime at age 26?
Well, Rutschman would never say this, but playing catcher both enhances his value and makes it less likely he will maximize his hitting potential. That’s reality when you live with your knees and back bent into a crouch and take 100 mph foul balls off your legs multiple times a week. Other than pitching, catching is easily the sport’s most debilitating occupation, a fact we were reminded of when Hyde scratched Rutschman because of back discomfort last Friday.
Rutschman might not be injured, but he’ll almost certainly be hurting the rest of the season.
Catchers such as Buster Posey, Joe Mauer and Ivan Rodriguez have transcended such aches and pains to post Most Valuable Player stat lines. Rutschman might do it too, and even if he never climbs that high, he’s a winning player.
His past two months have reminded us how steep that hill is for those who don the mask and chest protector.