Hello, friends.
We now sit at the lowest point of the 2026 Orioles season so far. After yesterday’s loss to the Rays, where they blew a 3-1 lead with two outs in the eighth inning and went on to lose by a 5-3 margin, the Orioles are 21-29, a season-low eight games below .500. They are increasingly slipping out of even the extremely-generous “playoff contender” window that is enabled by a third wild card and a weak April and May for the bulk of the American League.
I had to recap the affair due to contractual
obligations; you can find my rant about the not-so-lovely totals here. Having just finished that, here I am again with a blinking cursor in an open text box, trying to find some words to say as my favorite baseball team looks like it is once again not going to win the World Series in my lifetime. All offseason, all spring, we heard about how this year’s team was supposed to be better than this. Mike Elias came out and said that he thought the players who were part of last year’s disappointment would be stronger for having experienced that setback.
Fifty games into the 2026 season, we are yet to see the evidence of that from this year’s Orioles. The revamped coaching staff has not managed to prevent an ongoing series of fundamental errors. The players signed or acquired over the offseason to play key roles for the team are, by and large, not meeting expectations. There are so many overlapping messes that it’s hard sometimes to imagine improvement coming. A lot of things pretty much have to magically click into place. The few scattered successes are drowned in the tide of disappointment.
Things are bad enough that MASN analyst Ben McDonald is out there saying stuff like this on yesterday’s Orioles postgame show:
There’s a tendency in some places to make cynical assumptions about the amount of influence that the team holds over its broadcasters on the team-owned network. This was demonstrated most dramatically a few years back with the strange saga of MASN apparently suspending Kevin Brown for reading off a graphic that illustrated how bad the Orioles had been against the Rays. No one ever satisfactorily explained what happened there. Things like that feed an attitude that criticism is being squashed and positivity is being pushed.
I think a bigger percentage of that is that the broadcasters are around these guys almost on a daily basis and they mostly like them and they want to see them win. Their own jobs are probably more fun to do when the Orioles are winning. I can say that with a lot of confidence from personal experience: This job right here is more fun to do when the Orioles are winning!
Whatever the reason for it, the fact is that it is kind of a shock to see someone on MASN really light into the team like that. Jim Palmer, maybe. He’s done it before. McDonald is not usually the one to light people up. He said nothing wrong. “You either do or you don’t. And right now, the Orioles don’t.”
They don’t! They have once again plowed in the range of $160-170 million into the Opening Day payroll and the first two months of the season have gone poorly. The Orioles are frequently not just losing but losing in stupid ways that feel like they should be preventable for a team that has this kind of talent. This isn’t an irrevocable failure yet, but it is on the road to failure unless they turn things around. Looking at it right now, I just don’t know where that turnaround comes from.
Here’s the good news. The Orioles are guaranteed not to lose today. They have the day off. Do something fun where you minimize the amount of time you spend thinking about them. If nothing else, do it for me. I have to think about them because I have to write a series preview for Camden Chat for tomorrow.
Orioles stuff you might have missed
Mike Elias gets the bulk of fan criticism for the team’s poor season, but should he? (Steve on Baseball)
Steve Melewski isn’t willing to throw Elias out into the cold yet, “but if one 75-win season turns into another one, (ownership’s) confidence will surely erode some. Maybe to a large degree.”
Jackson Holliday still managing pain as he makes season debut (Baltimore Sun)
For one demonstration of bad luck afflicting the 2026 Orioles, consider the broken hamate bones of Holliday and Arizona’s Corbin Carroll, which occurred very close to one another on the calendar. Carroll has 2.5 bWAR through 45 games played. Holliday has played two games. These circumstances were entirely out of either team’s control. Arizona got lucky: Their star healed quick. The Orioles’ maybe-someday-star-or-if-you’re-pessimistic-maybe-someday-average-player did not heal quick.
Observations on Orioles 5-3 loss to Rays (School of Roch)
Roch dug in to a few of the specific narratives around yesterday’s game. If not for that eighth inning, there actually might have been positive ones.
Back in Tampa Bay area, Pete Alonso represents his old high school during Rays series (The Baltimore Banner)
You could actually feel a little good about this feel-good story if the Orioles had won yesterday’s game!
Three fun under-the-radar storylines emerging down on the farm (Orioles On The Verge)
I feel pretty safe in guessing that the On The Verge folks probably disagreed with the recent FanGraphs assessment of the Orioles farm system. Subscription required for full article here, where they hope to highlight some emerging depth.
Birthdays and Orioles anniversaries
In their 50th game last year, the Orioles lost a 10-inning game to the Red Sox, 6-5, in the first game of a doubleheader, falling to 16-34 on the season. This proved to be the low point of the 2025 Orioles. Game 2 of the doubleheader was Trevor Rogers’s first start of the season. They went 59-53 from this point onward. It wasn’t enough to dig out of that early hole. They are five wins better through the same number of games. Time will tell if they can do enough to dig out of this smaller hole.
There are a number of former Orioles who were born on this day. They are: 2016-19 outfielder Joey Rickard, 2009-16 catcher Matt Wieters, 2014 reliever Andrew Miller, 1999 catcher Tommy Davis, 2006 catcher Chris Widger, and 1979 outfielder Bob Molinaro. Today is Molinaro’s 76th birthday, so an extra happy birthday to him.
Is today your birthday? Happy birthday to you! Your birthday buddies for today include: seismology namesake Giuseppi Mercalli (1850), jazz musician Fats Waller (1904), Hall of Fame baseball manager Bobby Cox (1941), fool pitier Mr. T (1952), and rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (1972).
On this day in history…
In 1799, Napoleon abandoned a siege of the Ottoman-held fortress of Acre after about two months. He lost around a sixth of his men during the siege, a setback now recognized as the beginning of the end of his ambitious Egyptian campaign.
In 1911, a treaty between Mexican president Porfirio Díaz and dissident Francisco Maduro led to the resignation of Díaz, who had been president for 26 years. This ended fighting for a time, though the Mexican Revolution period went on for nearly another decade.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed a plane in Paris, becoming the first person to make a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Exactly five years later, Amelia Earhart landed in a pasture in Derry, Northern Ireland after experiencing bad weather; she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic with this completed, if unorthodox, flight.
In 2017, the final show of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus took place. An animal-free version of the circus re-launched in 2023.
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And that’s the way it is in Birdland on May 21. Have a safe Thursday.
