After Wednesday night’s latest ridiculous late-innings collapse, our own Mark Brown concluded:“In a lot of ways, the specifics don’t matter as much as the fact that there’s always something stupid that finds a way to happen.” He has a point. Eighty-two games into the season, we can’t keep denying what this team is made up of. And that seems to be: boneheaded mistakes. As Mark put it, “These guys ain’t got it.”
This latest collapse in LA was a typical boneheaded example: it was the tenth inning, with
the Orioles up 6-5 on the Angels with two outs. A groundball was hit to second base, an out that would have ended the game. But Keegan Akin was slow to cover first, and he dropped it. The runner got to third, and then scored the game-winner on a stupid little infield bouncer that Samuel Basallo couldn’t field cleanly. The Birds lost 6-5.
This wasn’t all. The Friday before, the Birds had lost a walkoff to the Dodgers (in a series that otherwise went well!). They had a 5-3 lead in the ninth, thanks to Jeremiah Jackson’s bases-loaded single. Things looked good. Alas, Ryan Helsley—making just his second appearance back after a seven-week stint on the IL with elbow inflammation—didn’t have his stuff back yet. He surrendered a Mookie Betts solo shot and then loaded the bases before Dalton Rushing’s two-out single tied it and a wild throw to the plate by Tyler O’Neill let the winning run score. The Orioles took the next two games, but it could have been a sweep against baseball’s best team.
Against Seattle, a couple days before that, a simple 3-1 loss with Brandon Young on the mound. But here, too, was another late-innings bummer. Brandon Young had pitched six good innings, but he put two on in the seventh. With the score 1-1, manager Craig Albernaz pulled his starter, and put in Grant Wolfram. Wolfy was not good: he gave up a sac bunt, walked J.P. Crawford, and got really burned by Cal Raleigh, whose bases-loaded single made it 3-1 Seattle.
Two days before that, the O’s were down 2-1 to San Diego after six. A manageable deficit, but a bit harder to climb out of when your relievers allow three runs in the last two innings. Rico Garcia gave up a two-run round-tripper, and Yennier Cano allowed an unearned run to score who’d reached base on an error by Gunnar at shortstop. The final score was 5-2.
Two more: the night before that, the O’s Trey Gibson had a terrible first inning, allowing a four-spot. The O’s again closed the lead, getting it to 4-2. But once more, they allowed three runs in the last three innings, all three on solo home runs off Albert Suárez. That sounds really hard to do.
Finally, there was another walkoff loss in Seattle. It was Rico Garcia, again, which is hard to comprehend, as he’s been the team’s best reliever all year. Before that, the Orioles had blown a four-run lead, got Leody Taveras called out on an automatic strike violation, and watched three different runners get thrown out at the plate. Then, with the score tied-4-4 in extras, Garcia got taken deep by Randy Arozarena. The Birds ended up losing 6-5. It was an orgy of stupidity.
So what explains these infuriating collapses? Bad defense? Bad relief pitching? Offensive futility late?
The truth is, Mark is right. It’s not that the Orioles are playing uniquely badly this last stretch. They went 2-3 in March, .500 in April, 13-16 in May, and are 10-12 thus far in June, sitting at 38-44 overall. But perhaps the continued mediocrity undersells a few specific, identifiable trends.
One is the bullpen: it was genuinely excellent in April, one of the better units in baseball, built almost entirely out of journeymen and waiver claims like Rico Garcia and Yennier Cano who had no track record of sustained success. Now it looks like that group was always living on borrowed time, overperforming its peripherals for a month before regression arrived in May and never left. The front office never fixed the one problem analysts flagged before the season even started: the lack of a trustworthy left-handed reliever. Keegan Akin and Grant Wolfram are the only lefty options, and the Orioles currently rank 29th in the league in left-handed reliever ERA, with opposing hitters slashing .286/.358/.439 against them.
Now add to that a defense that ranks among the league’s worst by both DRS and OAA, and no wonder that seventh- or eighth-inning leads keep turning into losses.
That’s pretty much the formula, folks. This is a thin, unproven bullpen short on lefties, playing behind defenders who don’t catch the ball as often as they should, in innings where the margin for error disappears entirely.
Remember, though, it was just a week before all of this ineptitude that the Orioles had won three walkoffs in a single week: Colton Cowser’s three-run blast off Kenley Jansen against Detroit, then a pair of late comebacks against the Blue Jays in a stretch where the offense suddenly looked alive and the team climbed back to .500.
This team isn’t bad; they’re just inconsistent. Messy, unreliable, unable to crack .500. But defense and relief are major weaknesses, and this last month has showed it.
Don’t shoot the messenger, but it looks like consistently inconsistent is what this team really is.
