It’s that time of a bad year again. The Orioles are in a tailspin and the natives are understandably restless.
Trouble is, there is no short-term solution to the problems that this team is experiencing. There is no magic bullet that will lay low the rest of the competition and allow the Orioles to rise from the ashes of a terrible quarter season.
So what happens? The internet is awash in demands for new leadership, and to what end?
Should the O’s fire Brandon Hyde and punish him for his inability to invent a new form of Tommy John surgery that only requires 15 days on the injured list? Or for only having the most wins in the American League the past two years instead of the whole sport? Or for winning a Manager of the Year award for only two of the past three seasons?
And how about Mike Elias? What, for conducting a near-perfect rebuilding project and filling the roster with a bunch of bright young stars who are having trouble dealing with a form of failure that none of them have ever experienced before?
Which one of them is to blame for not tackling Colton Cowser before he could stupidly dive into first base and tear up his thumb? Which one of them shook Grayson Rodriguez’s hand too hard when he arrived at spring training?
But we’re at the quarter pole of this season and even if you brought Connie Mack back from the dead the reasons for the Orioles’ horrible start are not going to be magically corrected before nature takes its course with the injured players and maturation works the same magic with the young, struggling hitters and fill-in starting pitchers.
Do you know what you get when you blow up the front office after two straight playoff seasons? You get 1998 through 2011. The team got on a managerial merry-go-round and fell victim to mercurial ownership and now we’re blaming Hyde and Elias for the Orioles not making it to the World Series since 1983.
Guess what? I don’t think the Orioles will recover from this start and reach the playoffs, but I do think this team is still bound for eventual glory if somebody doesn’t throw the baby birds out with the bathwater. Sorry for editing that time-worn cliché but it’s a cliché because history has proven that it’s the best way to illustrate this kind of situation in the fewest possible words.
There’s still plenty of enjoyment to be had from this season. Those convalescing players will come back from the IL. Those young hitters are beginning to show signs of the greatness they might express over the coming years. I’m guessing the second half of the season will be much better than the first, which will carry the team into 2026 with renewed hope for a deep playoff run.
The postseason is not an impossibility this year. The Orioles would have to gain 10 games on .500 by mid-July to set up for a healthy finish, but that is a very big ask with the way they are playing right now.
I’d like to keep the faith, but I’m a bit of an agnostic at the moment.