Gruv is having their annual Gruv Day sale today, and unlike a lot of the Amazon sale, these are legit deals.
Steelbooks, studio stuff, tv and film collections. Solid deals everywhere. Check it out.
Sitting out on the deck enjoying some coffee. Supposed to be prepping for a client meeting Monday morning. Instead, I'm digging through BR to try to answer the "is it the pitching for the hitting" question. Tempting to say "both," but that's the coward's way out and, more importantly, I think inaccurate.
In no world has our pitching been good. But the big numbers allowed by our starters (and, yesterday, the pen) overshadow the fact that we weren't going to win most/all of these games even with great or average pitching because we can't score.
Again, the huge run totals allowed by the pitching staff are indicative of a larger problem. The pitching isn't great. But we're in the spot we're in almost exclusively because our offense cannot produce runs for the second year in a row.
This sub, after every loss, decides to blame "The Organization" for player performance issues. As a reminder, front offices construct a team based on available information. That information includes how well a player is expected to perform based on what they've done in the past.
So I took at look at the current performance of select players and compared them to their historical averages. There are a few minor flaws with this (young players like Beavers, Holliday, Basallo and Mayo are operating on small sample sizes; older players in steep physical decline shouldn't be expected to produce to those averages), but overall it paints a pretty realistic picture.
BATTING
In a nutshell, we have four impact starters dramatically underperforming and two injured (one for the season), with only Adley and Ward overperforming. I'd argue Basallo is also overperforming, but his prior career sample size is so small that it isn't worth including here from a stat standpoint; Mayo is clearly underperforming despite limited metrics. JJ and Taveras are also solid contributors but not everyday players.
It's not just the underperformance. It's who's underperforming. Gunnar and Pete are supposed to be our big bats, and they are actively hurting the team. Gunnar is 7th in Ks with 55, and Alonso has 42. Both players have worse K/plate appearance and HR/plate appearance numbers than their career averages.
PITCHING
All of our starters - every single one - is performing dramatically worse than expectations. Rogers was an expected regression, but not to anywhere near-5.00 ERA. Bradish had a 2.53 ERA in 12 starts coming off TJ last season and his current ERA is nearly double that. Baz and Bassitt are both over a point worse than their career averages; you could say Bassitt was expected given his age, but he posted a 3.96 last year with Toronto. Slim and Young are all more or less in line with their career averages/expectations. Neither has taken a leap.
In terms of the bullpen, only Rico is exceeding expectations. Helsey is a good signing, Cano seems to be old Cano again, but Enns, Akin, Wolfram, Nunez, and Kittridge all range from bad to quite bad.
OK, SO WHAT?
Baseball teams win or lose on the performance of their players. Front offices put the pieces in place, managers set lineups and make bullpen calls. Baseball, more than any other sport, is about what the players do on the field. This season, 70 percent of our lineup and 100 percent of our pitching staff are performing dramatically worse on the field than they should.
You expect some variance in a season. A few players will not quite hit the marks we set; others will exceed them. The 2026 Orioles are underperforming almost everywhere and overperforming almost nowhere. Some of this is injuries, sure. But fundamentally, the players are not doing their jobs. No manager or front office change will fix that.
He dropped this two offseasons ago when the Mets were debating whether to re-sign him. Clearly he saw something in the Orioles that wasn't solely "formulas based."
This isn't a doomer post. More of a sobering look at the reality of the situation, but I will say it was admittedly difficult to write this and come away with much optimism.
Bottom line: we probably have to go 4-0 or 3-1 in the remaining road games to have a chance to salvage the season. This is a super high leverage week for a couple of reasons.
First one is pretty obvious: we're 4 games under .500. The division is already a pipe dream, and even though the AL stinks, a few teams will figure it out soon and put distance between us and a WC spot if don't start winning series. Getting back to .500 with the As and Yankees coming at home provides some reason for optimism. We could weather a split homestand and then hopefully creep back into the black against the miserable Nats.
A 1-3 stretch, though, puts us 16-22 by Thursday. A home split would then mean 19-25. Even a Nats sweep still has us 3 under .500 as we head back out on the road. Which leads into the second point...
The schedule is about to get a lot tougher.
Here's the rest of May:
And here's June:
There aren't a lot of get-right series in there. It's tempting to think about these division opponents as chances to make up ground in the AL East. But A) the Yankees are winning the division so its really just about net wins at this point and B ) most of these teams are better than us right now.
We probably have to be somewhere around 6-10 games over. 500 by the end of the White Sox series to really be in position to go for it at the trade deadline.
If the latter doesn't appear that daunting, know that only the Braves and Yankees have .660 WP or better right now. Hell, only 6 teams are better than .590!
Despite the common narrative, we aren't cursed by injuries or get injured more than other teams. But we have had bad injury luck with respect to timing. April was the month to build wins, and everyone got hurt. Most good baseball teams don't get to 90-100 wins by beating everyone. They consistently sweep or take series from bad/mid teams and stay close to .500 against fellow contenders. The Orioles, on the other hand, lost series to the Rangers, Guardians, Diamondbacks, Red Sox, and Pirates.
If you want an optimistic take, there's obviously a little wiggle room baked in here. This isn't golf. You don't have to make a 48-40 cut by July 4th. Holliday should come back in by June. Rogers and Helsey will be back this month. Other teams will lose players to injury.
Still, we're running out of playoff paths. And we'll have a lot fewer if we can't find a way to end this road trip with a .500 record.
I know the common refrain is to pretend everyone who comes up from the minors or joins this team can’t hit (except Adley, Gunnar, Ward, OHearn, JJ, Westy…), but Basallo really seems to be figuring it out in real time.
The numbers are encouraging (4 homers and 5 walks to just 4 Ks during this stretch), but it’s also the eye test. He’s not chasing nearly as much. He taking advantage of pitcher mistakes and/or working counts to put himself at an advantage. His bat speed and power is so great that he doesn’t even need to connect flush. Being content to get on base if the pitches aren’t there is a needed trait on this team, and if he continues to blossom that contract is going to be one of the best in the entire league.