If you’re a career pessimist like me you probably knew that when the Orioles hit three straight home runs Tuesday night in one of the most uplifting innings of this season, it was just another cruel tease.
I just couldn’t help but think that the O’s were going to find a way to lose. I even said out loud that Gregory Soto was going to walk the leadoff batter in the eighth and the Texas Rangers would find a way to wipe the smile off the faces of all the sweaty fans who had braved the blazing heat at Oriole Park waiting for something good to happen.
Oriole relievers have been doing that a lot lately … putting runners on base with no one out. Just a few days ago, Seranthony Domínguez, Soto and Bryan Baker took the mound in succession and walked the first batter each faced on four pitches in a close game that the O’s somehow managed to win anyway.
Whether the outcome has been good or bad, it seems like the Orioles are constantly sending the production crew scurrying to figure out how many decades you have to go back to find the last time some game-changing event happened. Either that, or Kevin Brown is the world’s greatest baseball trivia guy.
The discouraging loss to the Rangers was another one for the ages. The Orioles scored five runs on four hits in that one big beautiful inning. The Rangers’ pitching staff threw a no-hitter in the other nine. When was the last time that happened?
Who cares? That kind of thing seems to happen with amazing regularity these days. This is the same team that scored eight runs in the second inning of last Wednesday’s game and then watched helplessly as the Tampa Bay Rays scored the next 12. Then, after the Orioles showed some mettle by coming back to win the final game of that series and winning the series opener against the Yankees, they got no-hit for seven innings by Clarke Schmidt in a shutout loss and then scored two runs in the first inning on Sunday before the hitters again took the rest of the day off.
Just to further belabor this point, during the ignominious 12-8 collapse last Wednesday, the only baserunner the Orioles managed over the final seven innings came when Colton Cowser was hit by a pitch in the sixth. Seriously, it’s almost impossible to be that good one minute and that bad the next.
I guess you can chalk up all this inconsistency to the ravages of all the injuries this team has suffered through over the past four months (including spring training). It might even be fair to say that they’ve displayed character and resilience by pulling themselves up after falling 18 games under .500 to keep hope alive for a respectable season, but some of these games are almost too painful to watch.
It’s tough to compete with a worn-out bullpen and it had to be quite a gut punch when the Orioles lost Adley Rutschman for the next several weeks and Jordan Westburg again (hopefully not for long) when they were just starting to get healthy again.
They also were just starting to shed their dramatic disadvantage against left-handed pitching with more right-handed offensive depth when Rutschman and Westburg went down.
It’s obviously been that kind of year, but the season is not lost yet. There has been some real incompetence, like complicating the 10th inning last night with a couple of wild pitches, and a bad throw to home plate in the fourth that could have cut down a run, but there also has been an inordinate amount of bad luck.
That usually evens out over the course of the marathon baseball season, so maybe the Orioles can still make a run at .500 before the front office is tempted to break the team up at the trade deadline.
Until that happens, I’m keeping my glass half empty.