The Orioles are going to have to play more than two good games in a row to get anywhere positive this season.
With one more game played, the Orioles will be almost exactly a quarter of the way into the 2025 season. Their 15-24 record up to this point has not been inspiring. Or perhaps I should say that it HAS been inspiring, but what it’s been inspiring is a lot of gloom about bumbling along towards an eventual sell-off, with uncomfortable questions about whether the position player core will even be able to rally and compete again next year.
Some things have gotten better lately. As my Camden Chat colleague Tyler Young noted yesterday, the Orioles rotation is starting to deliver at the level it needed to be able to do for the team to succeed this year. That’s been helped largely by Tomoyuki Sugano continuing to pitch well as Dean Kremer turns in a better direction. Now Zach Eflin’s back too, which should keep Charlie Morton from making any more starts.
The bullpen is sitting squarely in mixed results territory. Félix Bautista is doing about as well as any of us could have hoped up to this point. Bryan Baker is exceeding expectations – I know, I’m as surprised as anybody. Keegan Akin and Yennier Cano are meeting expectations. On the negative side, Gregory Soto and Seranthony Domínguez are pitching like Mike Elias was an idiot for acquiring both of them last July. And as for another “Elias looks like an idiot” thing, well, we don’t need to belabor the gap between Cionel Pérez.
Collectively, the offense remains confusing, largely because many individuals are continuing to get poor results. The team has averaged just three runs scored per game for May so far. The only thing that’s going to get them is a strong chance of picking in the top five of next year’s draft. I’d rather have a winning 2025 Orioles team.
Of late, two Orioles have been hitting great: Ryan O’Hearn and Gunnar Henderson are each OPSing over 1.000 over the last 15 days. Jackson Holliday, Ramón Laureano, and Emmanuel Rivera are in the .800s, which is pretty good. The rest are varying degrees of bad, all the way down to Cedric Mullins. The early-season hot streak is long gone. Mullins is batting .133/.152/.222 in this stretch of time.
My question for readers this week is meant to get you thinking about where this will shake out for the record for this month.
Keep in mind before logging your vote that the Orioles are 3-6 so far in May. If they continue at that pace, with another 18 games scheduled this month, they will end up the month with a 9-18 record for May. Worse than that would be a disaster. Bumbling along in the range of 9-11 wins would not be a whole lot better.
12 wins is the point where they could at least say they’ve gone .500 from here on to the end of the month, and we might be able to feel like the bleeding had stopped, if nothing else. If the Orioles get into the 15+ range, that would feel like a miracle and probably have people more readily believing that June could go well too.
Last week, I asked which struggling Oriole you had the most hope would improve. A four-way poll between Heston Kjerstad, Dean Kremer, Ryan Mountcastle, and Cade Povich was very evenly divided, with all four players having between 20 and 29% of the vote. The 29% of people who voted for Kremer – the leader – are looking like they made a savvier choice than the close runner-up, Kjerstad.