May was a disaster. June is starting off better.
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Right now, for the first time all season, the Orioles are riding a four-game winning streak. Over a stretch of baseball now spanning a week and a half, the O’s are consistently combining pretty good starting pitching with good-enough offense. In addition to the current streak, they’ve won seven of the last nine games.
How for real is this improvement? What is it going to bring us in the win column over the month of June? That’s what I’d like you to think about in this week’s survey. The Orioles are scheduled to play 27 games this month. They need to win 14 to be above .500 for the month.
As the pessimists among us are already thinking, the Orioles pulling off the sweep of the White Sox, while nice, also didn’t prove very much. Pitching well against that team is not indicative of actually doing better, and even though they won all three games, the O’s failed to capitalize on tons of scoring opportunities and only got the sweep because the White Sox are somehow even more inept than the O’s are with runners in scoring position.
There is food for the optimists too. Back in the rotation, Charlie Morton has done better against more than just Chicago. Dean Kremer just finished a very good May. Tomoyuki Sugano continues to stymie MLB batters. The offense has recently done just enough that you could maybe almost really believe that Colton Cowser’s return last night plus the coming return of Jordan Westburg are the things that will unlock their best potential.
I asked this question about May in the middle of the month, just before the team took a swan dive, during which manager Brandon Hyde was fired. At that time, 39% of voters believed the O’s would manage to win 12, 13, or 14 games for the month. They finished instead at a 9-18 record. A close second place of 34% of voters were correct there, predicting 9, 10, or 11 wins.
There have been mirages of improvement over two- or three-game stretches for these Orioles already. They had a few of them through April and May before resoundingly answering the question “Are things getting better?” with the answer: “No!” Is it different this time around? If the Orioles continue to play well through this west coast swing, that might be easier to believe in.