For a little while there, it seemed like August might be a fun month for the Orioles. They won series against three likely playoff teams in a row, in the middle of this stretch they called up both Dylan Beavers and Samuel Basallo, and it seemed like they might be able to make it a third winning month in a row. Since then, they’ve lost seven of eight games and you can forget about that. The team is now below-.500 under interim manager Tony Mansolino. The offense has disappeared.
Awaiting them this
weekend is the Giants. Their playoff hopes are pretty much kaput at this point. They’re 6.5 games back of the Mets for the third wild card, and they’ve also got the Reds to pass to pull off a miracle. They knew this a while ago, of course. That’s why they traded away three players before the deadline, including former Orioles prospect Mike Yastrzemski.
The Giants have had to win their last five games just to get as close as they are now. They haven’t had a winning month since April and unless they sweep the Orioles, they won’t have a winning August either. Buster Posey was probably hoping for better in his first season as the president of baseball operations over there. Or maybe he wasn’t. I don’t know. Front office people are weird and as we know from our own head guy, sometimes winning is not strategically relevant.
The biggest headlines about the Giants so far this season came after they traded for out-of-favor Red Sock Rafael Devers and his substantial remaining contract. Devers has played 62 games with the Giants since the trade and is batting .241/.349/.447, numbers that are all well below how he was hitting in Boston before the trade. My fervent wish for that trade to immediately and hilariously bite the Red Sox did not come true. My fervent baseball wishes seldom do come true.
Game 1, Friday 10:15pm Eastern
Note: This game will only have a video broadcast on Apple TV+.
- BAL starter: Dean Kremer – 4.19 ERA, 4.02 FIP, 1.228 WHIP in 26 G
- SFG starter: Robbie Ray – 2.93 ERA, 3.89 FIP, 1.140 WHIP in 27 G
The Orioles have been having problems with left-handed pitchers almost the whole season long. Ray is left-handed. This is their batting split against lefties: .231/.296/.362. It’s brutal stuff. Left-on-left matchups are particularly hurting them, with O’s lefty batters mustering just a .617 against their same-handed pitchers. That’s 40 points of OPS lower than the leaguewide splits for that group.
In addition to being left-handed, Ray is back to being pretty good this season after having his 2023 and 2024 seasons impacted by Tommy John surgery and recovery. He’s not quite on the level that won him the Cy Young for the Blue Jays in 2021, since his strikeout rate has fallen a lot and the walk rate has increased. Ray hasn’t been as good in the second half of this season, at least, with a .780 OPS allowed since the All-Star break.
Kremer is coming off of getting rocked for seven runs (six earned) in a five-inning start against the Astros. This is not an uncommon occurrence for Kremer. The specifics always vary. What tends not to vary is that after going through a stretch of starts where someone might be tempted to think, hey, maybe if he can keep this going, he’ll be worth slotting in higher in the rotation, that’s when he gets rocked.
Game 2, Saturday 7:15pm Eastern
Note: This game will only have a video broadcast on FOX.
- BAL starter: Trevor Rogers – 1.40 ERA, 2.33 FIP, 0.828 WHIP in 13 G
- SFG starter: TBD as of this writing
Important Rogers update: The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka asked Rogers yesterday what is the explanation for his middle name being J’Daniel. Rogers explained that the name is actually J-Daniel, which he’s never bothered to have MLB correct. (It’s always amusing to me when things like this happen: Think of Zach Britton having actually been Zack Britton all along.) J-Daniel is a nod to his two grandparents, JD and Daniel.
Rogers is on a heater that I still can’t believe has happened. Sometimes, the superstitious part of my brain doesn’t even want to speak of it, in case that scares it away. Going back to June 23, he has not allowed more than two runs in any start. Rogers is in the midst of an August where he’s started five games and has surrendered a total of five runs across those games, with six or more innings pitched in every game and seven-plus innings in four of the five games.
If Rogers he had 26 starts instead of 13, he’d be the favorite for the AL Cy Young at this point. If he’d been in the rotation pitching like this from the start of the season, the Orioles would probably be in a better position than they are now. Their recent slide has unfortunately pulled them away from a point where you could lament if only three or four games flipped to wins then the Orioles would be somewhere.
Game 3, Sunday 4:05pm Eastern
- BAL starter: Tomoyuki Sugano – 4.06 ERA, 4.87 FIP, 1.274 WHIP in 25 G
- SFG starter: Justin Verlander – 4.47 ERA, 3.81 FIP, 1.431 WHIP in 23 G
This is a battle of veteran starting pitchers. Verlander, at age 42, might finally be getting to the end of the line of a Hall of Fame career. He’s bounced back somewhat from a 5+ ERA season with the Astros a year ago, but not enough to actually be a good or even decent pitcher this year. Verlander sits at 0.0 bWAR in 23 starts. Nobody’s going to pay him $15 million to pitch one more season as an exactly replacement-level pitcher. I guess I shouldn’t say nobody. Who knows if Mike Elias will get weird about having a Charlie Morton-like guy in next year’s Orioles rotation, instead of paying for someone younger who might actually be good.
So far in August, batters are hitting just .226/.276/.349 against Sugano. Over five starts, he has a 2.86 ERA for the month. Last outing against the Red Sox was worse than the rest, with four runs allowed in six innings, so we’ll see if that sets a new pattern or if he can go back to what he was doing earlier in the month. All in all, it’s been a solid signing, though he sure did go through a rough patch there in June and July.
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Can the Orioles break out of the funk they’ve settled into over the last week in this series? If they start hitting again, they probably can. If they don’t, then they won’t. In that second case, we’ll all again be wondering what is going to need to change to have things go better next season.
Typically, there would be a poll here. Something is not working with our new polling tool at this moment. Let us know in the comments below whether you think the Orioles can snap the losing streak in this series or maybe even win two games.
