Whatever this is, it’s not working out so far.
There are 140 games left for the Orioles to play in the 2025 season. The way that they have played so far, this feels more like a threat than a source for optimism about time remaining to turn things around. We’re stuck with these guys for HOW many more games? Something is rotten and the O’s are going to have to figure out what it is and what they can do about it before the season gets away from them and it becomes a grim march to wait and see which Oriole gets traded away in July.
This is a feeling that is fueled heavily by the previous two games that the Orioles have played. Getting their butts kicked by the Reds on Sunday, a 24-2 demolition, was tough to stomach. The Reds offense was a mess and the O’s had no business making them look like that. Add into it last night’s 7-0 loss to the Nationals, in which the O’s had no signs of life at the plate while piling more onto the season lowlight reel with defensive miscues, and there’s a strong pull towards believing in dire scenarios about this club.
The question that the Orioles face is what can they do about it? It is an answer that every person involved is going to have to come up with for themselves. General manager Mike Elias needs to examine the gap between what he thought would happen and this and figure out if his analytics process is generating bad information. Manager Brandon Hyde and the coaching staff must assess whether they are pushing the right buttons to get players in the best position to succeed. The players who are underperforming have to have some internal motivation to be better than they are.
The starting rotation
Elias screwed this up over the offseason. There’s no getting around it. Exactly what alternative strategy might have worked out better is a matter for some debate. There are hypothetical alternatives that look good right now (sign Nick Pivetta or Jack Flaherty) and others that don’t (trade for Luis Castillo or Dylan Cease).
This is both the worst thing going on right now and the one that might have the easiest solution. Three of the five guys in the Opening Day rotation have been pretty bad so far. That’s Charlie Morton, Cade Povich, and Dean Kremer. The 41-year-old Morton might just be cooked. Elias only needs to recognize that the $15 million is a sunk cost. Either Povich or Kremer could be sent to the minors once a better alternative presents itself. Some patience may be warranted for Kremer, who is still plenty young enough where the sudden deterioration from his big league track record is notable and could change in time.
Other pitchers are coming. The Orioles signed Kyle Gibson late in spring training. He could arrive as soon as Saturday. The team is staying positive about the injured Zach Eflin, suggesting he might be back in a couple of weeks. A little farther out, Trevor Rogers just had the start of his rehab assignment announced. A month from now, your least favorite starting pitcher probably won’t still be starting. Which is no guarantee that anyone will be any happier with Gibson or Rogers. I feel even worse about where the O’s are just knowing these are the hoped-for reinforcements.
The manager
The Hyde haters are never far off. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a loss to bring them out of the woodwork. There are people who have been piling years of complaints at his feet, most of which I don’t even think are reasonably his fault. A lot of it seems to boil down to not liking the fact that the Orioles did not win a game in either of the last two playoffs. I don’t like that being true either.
Hyde kept everyone moving in a positive direction even in the middle of those losing years, allowing the team to find players who were able to contribute to winning big league teams. As the prospects arrived and the team did find success, Hyde had a team full of players looking to establish themselves in one way or another and it all seemed to be working great until around the All-Star break of last year.
For the most part, I don’t think Hyde is part of the problem, but I am increasingly wondering how much he is part of the solution. It is plausible that for as much leadership that Hyde has shown, maybe his brand of motivation doesn’t work when the situation is “the team has been good and everyone needs to keep his edge for the team to keep being good.” There are ample examples so far this year of the Orioles not just playing bad, but playing stupid. Bad is not something Hyde can directly attack. Stupid is, and so far he and his coaches are not fixing that.
The lineup
When we were all waiting through the crappy Orioles years for the star players to be drafted, develop, and arrive, the imagined combination of Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson turned out to be the big ones. It’s no coincidence to me that these two guys being on the scene and showing out as stars led the O’s to a 101-win season in 2023, and a just-as-hot pace over the first half of last year. The plan for Orioles success in 2025 ran through them. There was no other way.
So far, they ain’t got it. Rutschman is batting .200/.297/.375, while Henderson is hitting just .213/.250/.410. The only good thing there is to say here is that at least they’re hitting for power when they do hit it, but I don’t think there’s going to be any reversal of fortunes for the 2025 team unless these guys get it going.
For Henderson, you can perhaps suspect that his missing the last month of spring training means he still needs some time to adjust for the season. Rutschman is an increasingly-agonizing mystery. Last year, you could (and I certainly did) write it off as he was secretly injured. This rationalization does not fly now that an offseason has gone by and the results still aren’t there.
Other players get some share of the blame as well. Jordan Westburg is not far removed from an 0-30 streak that has his batting line in an even more hopeless place. Tyler O’Neill had seven hits in the first four games and has gotten just six hits over his next 13. Ryan Mountcastle, sitting on a .589 OPS, is not doing very much to validate the Orioles sticking with him rather than trading him to make room for Coby Mayo or even signing a free agent.
And the bench, oy vey, the bench. Elias spent $8.5 million to make Gary Sánchez the backup catcher. That may not turn out to be the offseason’s worst move (Morton, obviously) but it was the weirdest and it still looks weird. Why this dude? He’s OPSing .299 and everyone knew his defense is bad anyway. Another backup signing, Ramón Laureano, was in the failure box until he hit two home runs in Saturday’s game, but unless he improves his .200 average or .231 OBP, he’ll be headed back for bust territory. Jorge Mateo has one hit in 17 at-bats.
Unlike the starting rotation, there’s nothing much to do here with internal personnel moves. You could make it Mayo time, but he’s only batting .230 with Triple-A Norfolk so he might not solve the “boom or bust” problem. Jud Fabian fans might like to see him get a shot. He’s hitting .224. Batting average does not tell us everything about a player’s quality but when the number is that low in the minors, you need a lot to balance that out for a player to be doing good things, and projecting that to happen while jumping to MLB is a tough sell for me.
Cionel Pérez
It’s not totally fair to single out Pérez for criticism in this way, except for his being the only underperformer in what’s otherwise been a decent bullpen to this point. That said, the bullpen has not been tested in many high-leverage situations due to the team’s other problems, so we can’t be sure what the Orioles have here quite yet. As for Pérez, he’s pitched in eight games and his ERA is 11.32. There’s an easy and time-honored baseball tradition on what to do with the worst guy in your bullpen after an uninterrupted stretch of bad outings: Get rid of him.
What makes the Pérez thing feel worse is that the Orioles roster decisions over this past offseason saw them go out of their way to get rid of Danny Coulombe, declining an available and cheap team option for 2025, to keep Pérez instead. Coulombe has not allowed a run in his first ten games. The common trend of curious Elias offseason moves that are not paying off runs through this as well.
**
If it was easy, they would have figured it out by now. The Orioles season hasn’t gotten away from them yet, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more of a miracle the eventual turnaround must be. They’ve got to figure out what needs to change, what they can change, and act on that to get out of the rut.