Hello, friends.
The grind resumes. The Orioles are back at it tonight. Anything could happen. That’s the frustrating thing about these guys. They are really, genuinely capable of playing some good baseball. They have won quite a few games that could be real, signature wins, if only they had won a few more non-signature wins too. Just ordinary, relatively uninteresting wins, like Wednesday’s series finale could have been, if not for, you know, everything that happened late in the game.
Instead, just
past the halfway point of the season, just about a month and a week until the trade deadline, they find themselves towards the back end of the muddled pack of AL Wild Card contenders. The third wild card spot is still held by a below-.500 team this deep into the season. The Orioles are not out of it, no matter how much games like the ones they played against the Angels can make it feel that way. It’s just that changing their fortunes is going to require doing something we haven’t seen them do: Playing sustained good baseball. For a whole lot of reasons, they have proven incapable of this.
I think that for a number of those reasons, the cake was baked over the offseason with the decisions that Mike Elias made in constructing the roster. He thought this group of relievers would be good enough to get by. He thought that the defense would be good enough to get by. Each of these things is proving to not be the case and there’s not much he can do about them now. That spray can of potpourri can only affect so much square footage at a time.
Should Elias lose his job for these errors? If this thing doesn’t improve by season’s end, I think that he should. He has not been able to sustain a good baseball team. After the 2024 season ended with another postseason disappointment, there were obvious problems to address. The team didn’t address them sufficiently heading into 2025, and it hasn’t sufficiently addressed 2025’s problems heading into 2026 either.
Although the baseball way is “three strikes and you’re out,” I don’t think that applies to general managers or presidents of baseball operations. Two strikes and you’re out is good enough by my reckoning there. We are looking at Elias’s second strike. If I was the billionaire with authority to make the decisions, I wouldn’t give him another chance, if he doesn’t pull off the mid-season pivot here.
One thing I would be quite interested to know about the Orioles is how they spent their off day yesterday. There’s stuff it sure seems like they could use some work on! We’ve probably all at some point in our lives encountered something spiritually similar to a punitive “one person on the team screwed up, so the whole team runs laps.” I don’t need the Orioles to run laps or wind sprints as punishment. I just want to know if they’re doing useful drills to reinforce the correct response to situations that they have recently screwed up.
If they are doing this, we sure aren’t seeing the results yet. I don’t think that’s totally because of guys playing out of position. Some of it is. But stuff like “cover first base on a ground ball” ought to be basic for pitchers and first basemen and Keegan Akin and Pete Alonso between the two of them couldn’t manage it during one of Wednesday’s crucial plays. Alonso took more firm post-game ownership of his mistake there than Akin did. I don’t know what they should do about that. I guess they don’t know either.
The Nationals await for three games starting tonight. Hopefully the version of Trevor Rogers who most recently pitched seven shutout innings against the Dodgers is the one who takes the field tonight. It’s a 7:05 start for the Friday night game.
Orioles stuff you might have missed
Orioles players reflect on the first half and gear up for what’s next (The Baltimore Banner)
One thing that comes across is that Orioles players don’t feel beaten and lost to the degree that many fans seem to.
Orioles shut out in first round of All-Star voting (School of Roch)
This was the obvious outcome before voting began and only became more obvious with how the team played during the voting period.
Pete Alonso discusses changes coming to Home Run Derby (Orioles.com)
The two-time Home Run Derby champion is a fan of the adjustments made to the format for this year.
Magic in the booth: Kevin Brown makes mark with Orioles (Press Box Online)
An excellent feature profile on Kevin Brown, my honorary cousin, who is genuinely one of the game’s great broadcasters. He is a delight every night he is on the call.
Birthdays and Orioles anniversaries
Today in 1970, Frank Robinson hit two grand slams during a 12-2 win over the then-Senators. He was just the seventh major league player to ever accomplish this in the same game. These turned out to be his only grand slams for the team.
There are a few former Orioles who were born on this day. They are: 2022-23 pitcher Austin Voth, 2007-08 infielder Luis Hernández, 1987 pitcher Mike Griffin, and 1960 outfielder Gene Green.
Is today your birthday? Happy birthday to you! Your birthday buddies for today include: Civil War general and probably-not-inventor of baseball Abner Doubleday (1819), WW2 Marine Corps legend Chesty Puller (1898), pro football Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe (1968), actors Chris O’Donnell and Nick Offerman (1970), actress Aubrey Plaza (1984), and singer-songwriter Ariana Grande (1993).
On this day in history…
In 1917, the first American soldiers arrived in France to join the conflict we now know as World War I. They would see combat within two weeks.
In 1945, the 50 Allied nations signed the charter for the United Nations in San Francisco.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. The remarks, made shortly after East Germany had put up the Berlin Wall, reinforced American support for the democratic West Germany.
In 1974, the first barcode was scanned at a grocery store in Ohio. This first use of a Universal Product Code sold a package of Wrigley gum.
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And that’s the way it is in Birdland on June 26. Have a safe Friday. Go O’s!
