The Orioles are on an even better pace through 54 games than they were a year ago, so that’s a nice start.
From the dawn of baseball’s wild card era 30 years ago up until now, the Orioles have qualified for the playoffs in consecutive seasons on just one occasion: 1996, when they were the AL’s wild card team, and 1997, when they went wire-to-wire and won the AL East. The 2024 Orioles team is one that we all hope will be the one to break this 25+ year stretch of never being good two years in a row.
As fun as things were from the 2012-16 era of the Orioles, when they made the postseason three times in five seasons, they never managed to get in there the next year. After each year that they were a good team, enough things went wrong that they missed out. It’s not like they missed by one or two games. These odd year O’s teams came up short by five games or more. Whatever the “it” was, the next year’s team just couldn’t duplicate it, or even come close.
A third of the 2024 season now is in the books and the Orioles are 35-19. That’s actually one game better than the 54-game record a year ago. After a stupid loss or a lost series, it might sometimes feel like these Orioles can’t possibly have “it” like they did a year ago. Longtime readers of this website know I’m not immune to that feeling.
For the time being, the Orioles record speaks for itself, and the assorted playoff odds reflect their record. At Baseball Reference, they’re 98.4% to make the postseason. FanGraphs has a 90.8% chance for the Orioles.
2012 -> 2013 Orioles
The wild card-winning Orioles of 2012 went 93-69. The 2013 O’s followed that up with an 85-77 record, a drop of eight wins.
What went wrong?
Over the course of the 2012 season, arguments over whether the team was actually as good as its record flared up the whole time. By season’s end, the Orioles finished 11 wins better than their Pythagorean expected won-loss record – 82-80, because over the full season the O’s scored just seven more runs than they allowed. A big part of this gap can be explained by the team having an incredible 29-9 record in one-run games. Getting to that record was helped by closer Jim Johnson having a massively successful season with 51 saves.
The next year, Johnson had 50 saves, which was still amazing. However, he was not in his 2012 form, or did not have his 2012 luck. Johnson went from three blown saves in all of 2012 to nine in 2013, and he had an additional three games where he entered into a tie game and ended up taking the loss. The 2013 team dropped to 20-31 in one-run games, a .392 winning percentage.
The 2013 Orioles actually scored 33 more runs than they did the previous year, and the team’s OPS increased by 16 points. I think a large part of this was concentrated in the Chris Davis leap from 33 home runs to a team record-setting 53. Several crucial 2012 Orioles slipped at the plate, including Nick Markakis (149 point drop in OPS), Matt Wieters (60 points), and Nate McLouth (48 points).
Let’s not forget about the starting rotation, which most notably saw Jason Hammel’s 3.43 ERA jump to 4.97, and Chris Tillman’s fun 2012 half-season ERA of 2.93 go up to a still good but less great 3.71. Injuries here and there plus the continuing failure as starters in Baltimore by Jake Arrieta and Zack Britton led to the team trying out Freddy Garcia (5.77 ERA), and trading for Scott Feldman (4.27) and Bud Norris (4.80).
Did we know they didn’t have “it” after 54 games?
The team had a 30-24 record through 54, which is a 90-win pace, so in that sense, no. The 2012 team had an identical record at that point in the season. Some of the individual problem elements were already apparent, including the substantial disappointment for Johnson and Hammel.
2014 -> 2015 Orioles
The AL East champion 2014 Orioles finished with a 96-66 record. The 2015 team finished at 81-81, slipping by 15 wins.
What went wrong?
The division-winning team had a 3.43 ERA and allowed 593 runs for the year. The follow-up act saw the ERA explode to 4.05, with exactly 100 more runs allowed. Unlike the last time around, this wasn’t a relief problem. The Britton-led bullpen was just as good as in 2014.
The starting pitchers were not. Tillman, who had been good for the previous three years, hit a rough patch and saw his ERA jump to 4.99. Miguel González, also pretty good since 2012, was up at 4.91. Worst of the lot was Norris, a 2014 standout, who fell apart with an ERA of 7.06 and was actually released in August. All of these things falling apart meant that the team swooned even though this was the best season Ubaldo Jiménez pitched as an Oriole, with an exactly league-average ERA+ of 100.
Once again, we see an Orioles team with worse fortune as a group even though Davis improved on the previous year. In this case, Davis was bad for most of 2014 and suspended for the end of it. He hit 47 homers and OPSed .927 and that wasn’t enough. Steve Pearce went from ‘14 surprise (.930 OPS) to ‘15 disappointment (.711). J.J. Hardy fell from an already below-average offense (.682 OPS to .564). Delmon Young followed up the double with a .628 OPS.
That’s just counting players where it was the same guy from one year to the next. Another part of the problem for the 2015 Orioles is that they saw Nelson Cruz and Nick Markakis depart as free agents and their attempts to replace those guys with the likes of Travis Snider, Jimmy Paredes, and Gerardo Parra, were not successful.
Did we know they didn’t have “it” after 54 games?
At this point in their season, the 2015 Orioles had a record of 25-29. That’s actually not too far off the pace of the 2014 team, who were 27-27 through 54. (No, really.) Some problems were on display (Hardy, Norris, Snider, and Tillman among them) and others were not yet. Some things that would get better had not yet occurred. Davis had only hit 12 homers of an eventual 47.
2016 -> 2017 Orioles
The 2016 Orioles were the road wild card team with an 89-73 record. In 2017, they fell flat from there, dropping to 75-87. That’s -14 wins from one year to the next.
What went wrong?
A naive fool might have thought there was no way that the 2017 Orioles could do worse in the rotation than the 2016 team, who had all of the following at a 5.27 ERA or higher: Yovani Gallardo, Jiménez, Tyler Wilson, and Mike Wright. The only one of these guys to start more than one game for the 2017 team was Jiménez. They moved on from most of their starting pitching problems problems!
That fool (it was me) was plenty wrong because the Orioles just added new problems: Wade Miley (5.61 ERA) and Jeremy Hellickson (6.97 ERA in 10 games). Then Tillman also spectacularly fell apart, possibly connected to an unsolvable shoulder injury, with an ERA jumping by more than four runs. Jiménez, the nicest punching bag of all time, was also worse, going from an ERA that rounds down to 5 to one that rounds up to 7. Already-bad things can always get worse.
Deprived of Britton for more than half the season, the bullpen saw its ERA go up by more than half a run. Brad Brach as closer could not follow up on Britton’s near-flawless season from the previous year. Even when Britton came back from a forearm injury, he wasn’t (and never again would be) 2016 Britton. These two things combined sent the Orioles to a 4.97 ERA, second-worst in the AL.
For a third time, we see an Orioles team where the offense, in the aggregate, was nearly identical from one year to the next. The 2016 team scored 744 runs while the 2017 guys got 743 across. The big picture problem was the pitching.
Which is not to say there weren’t big problems with the offense. Davis accelerated his slide into ignominious ruin. The decision to bring back Mark Trumbo after he hit 47 home runs in 2016 did not pay off for the Orioles. Hardy dropped down to .578 OPS again as his career came to an end. Even Manny Machado ran into struggles compared to the previous year – still above average with a .782 OPS, but down by 94 points.
Did we know they didn’t have “it” after 54 games?
If you want to split hairs, I’m not sure that the 2016 Orioles had “it” in the first place. They ended up having even less of “it” by the 2017 season’s end after a 7-21 finish from September 1 on. At least through 54 games, the 2017 team was on pace for 87 wins. Had they stayed on that pace, they’d have been the second wild card team again.
Some of the problems had revealed themselves and others had not. If you can believe it, Davis still had a .796 OPS after 54 games. Miley was pretty good up to that point (2.82 ERA). Tillman and Jiménez were well on their way to bad seasons.
2023 -> 2024 Orioles
We can’t know where it will end up, but as mentioned above, the pace for now is ahead of where they were a year ago.
Things that have gone wrong
John Means missed a month, made four starts, and is gone again, perhaps for good. Kyle Bradish missed a month and we’ll be nervous about him all year. Each of Dean Kremer, Grayson Rodriguez, and Tyler Wells also spent time on the injured list; Kremer and Wells are still there. Trying to replace Félix Bautista has gone about as well for the bullpen as anyone might have feared. Craig Kimbrel needs many more smooth outings before I feel comfortable about him again. Seventh and eighth inning guys like Keegan Akin and Yennier Cano are also having problems.
Jackson Holliday debuted with performance that could not have done more to squash the hype for the time being, then was sent back to the minors. Austin Hays and Cedric Mullins have been very bad. Anthony Santander has been underwhelming for a right fielder/designated hitter. Ramón Urías provides zero to potentially negative value as a bench player. I’m glad he homered last night, though.
Do we know they don’t have “it” after 54 games?
No.
My natural inclination to pessimism about the Orioles aside, two big things are working for them. One, they won 101 games last year. They could slip by a dozen wins and still be at 89, which was the third wild card in the AL for 2023. At this point, it would take going .500 the rest of the way for the O’s to have “only” 89 wins. I think it would take more going wrong than we’ve already seen for the team to play at that kind of pace over such a long timeframe.
The other big thing is that the Orioles have a stock of prospects that they can use to either fortify their big league roster directly or to trade their surplus for good players – which none of the ‘13, ‘15, or ‘17 teams ever really did. That should help maintain the resilience that they’ve demonstrated already.