WASHINGTON – The team that won 101 games two years ago and backed it up with another playoff berth last year is now lucky if it can win a three-game series.
A young core whose burgeoning talent was only exceeded by how much fun it looked like they were having between the white lines has more often looked dazed and desultory, usually undone by the worst rotation in the major leagues and sometimes by the enduring cruelty of the game.
Simply, these Baltimore Orioles have fallen into a hole nobody saw coming – and must learn to dig out of one far sooner in their careers than they expected.
They’ve now lost five of six series, splitting two others, and after losing for the second time in as many nights in their “Battle of the Beltways” set are suddenly facing a sweep at the hands of the Washington Nationals, with an on-paper pitching mismatch in the finale.
Yet that’s the case most nights with this club. It’s largely the injuries (Grayson Rodriguez will be fortunate to return by June, Zach Eflin perhaps next month) exacerbated by gross underperformance from Dean Kremer and Charlie Morton, the former hoping it’s his traditionally cold April start and the latter aiming, at 41, to pin the first loss on the indomitable Father Time.
The Orioles are 9-14 and in the American League East cellar and here’s the boilerplate qualifier: There are still five months and 139 games remaining in this slog (That’s a game a month they need to make up on the Yankees, if you’re into math).
But if the mound matchup tilts the field against you every night, playing uphill can get exhausting, even for a very talented and young core.
And yes, they’re still very young.
Sure, it seems like they’ve been around forever now, their dugout Hydration Station and their cherub-cheeked prospects bubbling up from the minors seemingly every month. But aside from fourth-year catcher Adley Rutschman, now 27, it’s still a bunch of kids, relatively speaking.
Franchise shortstop Gunnar Henderson? Still just 23, opposite double-play partner Jackson Holliday, 21.
All-Star infielder Jordan Westburg? Sure, he’s 26, but after missing nearly half the 2024 season after getting struck by a pitch, he’s never played more than 107 games in a season.
The group, collectively, has never known failure. Never been around the block enough to know that when things bottom out, sometimes a turnaround is around the corner.
It’s the kind of thing you just don’t know until you’re going through it – and the Orioles are going through it.
“I’m figuring that out,” Westburg tells USA TODAY Sports. “I’m still really young in this league. I’m still finding my feet in this game. I understand that this game is very temporary and could be taken away from me at any moment. I’m trying not to focus on anything other than today. I’m trying to lean on guys and coaches who have been in this game a lot longer than me.
“And I think those guys are trying to support and get behind a lot of us young guys who maybe don’t have that experience under our belt.”
‘They’re hard on themselves’
It’s a tricky spot. The Orioles’ sudden rise from 110-game losers to contenders to World Series threats was experienced collectively, every talented piece promoted along the way just another bro showing up to the party.
At some point, the Rutschmans and Hendersons went from prodigies to cogs, All-Star talents on the field but perhaps not the natural-born leaders some hope to find in their greatest players.
Now, they’re a mishmash of great young talent and vets who may or may not be here a while longer, such as center fielder Cedric Mullins, a pending free agent, and slugging outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who can opt out of the final two years of his contract after this season.
At the core are the youngsters, whose dugout frolicking and childlike penchant for Star Wars and Legos belies an intensity that’s usually their finest asset on the field.
Yet there’s no way to outslug a 6.08 rotation ERA, no matter how stubborn you are.
“They’re hard on themselves,” says Orioles manager Brandon Hyde. “They have such high expectations for themselves that sometimes you get in your own way a little bit with that. There’s some frustration with how we’ve been playing, frustration with how certain guys are pitching and swinging the bat; they want to perform better.
“We were the first team to 80 wins last year, and then we struggled down the stretch. There’s still a lot of baseball left to play. You have to stay positive and remind them things can turn quickly.”
Westburg was in a pretty big hole himself, an 0-for-30 stretch last week that he snapped with a home run against Cincinnati. He had two more hits the next day and on Wednesday night hit an eighth-inning triple and scored the game-tying run on a sacrifice fly.
In the bottom of the inning, he nearly started a 5-4-3 double play that the Nationals beat out. They scored the decisive run on a sacrifice fly one batter later.
In Process vs. Outcome, Process took another L. Yet the grind continues.
“The term grinder infers that no matter how things are going, we’re going to work, and we’re going to be purpose-driven and process-oriented and I think that’s a perfect term to describe this group,” says Westburg, who had 15 homers and an .815 OPS through 101 games last year. “We don’t have the flash and the money signs that a lot of teams do, and so we have to win in other ways. It’s not always going to look the best or the prettiest, and at times we’re going to have stretches like this.
“But we’re grinders and we’re going to get through it, we trust in each other, we trust that the work and the professionalism that’s brought to the field every day is going to carry us through a long season.”
Mid-market malaise
Certainly, the window is not closing on this year nor the Orioles’ bigger-picture title chances. But every tick toward potential free agency for Rutschman (eligible after 2027) and Henderson (2028) feels like opportunity lost.
Despite the presence of new owner David Rubenstein, the Orioles were unable to pivot toward big spenders this past off-season, losing starter Corbin Burnes to Arizona after offering a four-year deal. General manager Mike Elias wagered $15 million that Morton had one more ride in him, but a 10.89 ERA in five starts means “everything is on the table,” says Hyde, perhaps even a bullpen demotion.
Elias did pluck Tomoyuki Sagano from Japan for $13 million, and Sagano has pitched gamely and posted a 3.54 ERA.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that the body language was much better Wednesday, when Sugano put up six zeroes after giving up three runs in the first, than it was Tuesday, when Kremer quickly pitched them out of the game, and Sunday, when Morton’s latest horror show set the stage for a 24-2 loss to Cincinnati.
“If we play baseball like that, we’re gonna win a lot of games,” a relatively chipper Hyde said Wednesday. “I thought we competed really well offensively. I thought we played extremely hard. Everybody was into it.”
It would be easy to blame the core for not being into it some nights. As Westburg noted, this generation of players leans heavily toward process-oriented, and controlling the controllables.
Well, there’s no controlling pitcher injuries and insufficient backfilling at the position, a must for an organization whose draft strategy is largely to load up on bats and pluck pitchers from other organizations whose profiles they fancy.
So it goes for a ballclub that was 36-19 at the end of May last year, and 35-21 two years ago. That will not happen this year.
But the Orioles have no choice but to figure out another path, even if they have no map to guide them.
“It’s kind of my first beginning of the season up in the big leagues, but this team expects to win,” says Holliday. “And it’s obviously frustrating to not win and perform at the level we know we can.
“But we’re going to keep pushing and keep being competitive and try to push through this. We have a really good team.”
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