The six straight wins have ended, but fans still believe many more June wins are coming.
Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Throughout the year we ask questions of the most plugged-in Baltimore Orioles fans and fans across the country. Sign up here to participate in the weekly emailed surveys.
The winning streak was fun while it lasted. Six Orioles wins in a row came to an end on Friday night out in Sacramento in a game where a few good things happened, but on balance it was mostly bad and so they lost, 5-4. No winning streak lives forever, so to some degree it was inevitable that there would be a game where they sputter a little bit. The question that is important now is: What’s next?
In this week’s survey, which went out into the wild in the middle of the series against the Seattle Mariners that ultimately turned into an Orioles sweep, I asked fans to think about how many games that the Orioles will be able to win in June. If I’d known that they were going to sweep the Mariners, I might have chosen different, higher numbers for the win total options, but, you know. How could anyone have known the O’s would suddenly win six in a row?
This was essentially a question asking how much people believe that the recent stretch of better play, which goes back to the middle of the Red Sox doubleheader two weeks ago, will show up in the record this month.
Here’s how the votes came in:
That’s a sizable victory for the crowd who believes 16 or more wins are coming from the Orioles in June. Assuming no games are rescheduled, there are 27 games on the June calendar, so that’s 54% of people voting for a June record of 16-11 or better. For a team that just followed up a 9-16 April with a 9-18 May, that would be a substantial turnaround.
Having already banked a 4-1 record through the month’s first five games, all it would take for the Orioles to reach a 16-11 record in June is going 12-10 over the month’s remaining games. If that’s what they did, they would sit at a 37-47 record at the end of the month.
That’s still quite a long way to climb to be back into even the fringes of postseason contention. Those dreams probably require more like a 14-8 Orioles record from here, with a final June tally flipped from the sad May at 18-9. Even then, at six games below .500 heading into July, there would be a lot of ground to make up and a lot of teams to pass, and it’s asking a lot of these guys to do that in the first place.
With the starting rotation finally having shown a stretch of quality, with key injured Orioles returning to the lineup, and with the bullpen looking like an improved unit more recently, the ingredients are there to believe in or at least hope for the longshot turnaround. If the O’s can get back into the win column for the last two games of the series against the Athletics, believing in this endeavor will be even easier to do.
This week’s survey brought to you by FanDuel.