The Orioles inability to impact the baseball at the top of the order – save for free-agent slugger Pete Alonso – has marred any hopes of being the team the man who put them together claimed they’d be.
Failed baseball czar Mike Elias said they would compete for the AL East title, with a dominant lineup their core strength. As usual he was dead wrong as his team sits in the basement of the division with Labor Day just around the corner and the lineup is the primary reason why. A rotation and bullpen that has flourished above any reasonable expectation still hasn’t been enough to overcome a pathetic lineup night in and night out that doesn’t hit starting pitching.
We are dissecting this baseball operations disaster in a multitude of ways. The splits between how the Oriole starters and substitutes produce is disgusting – fourth in total bases among all subs and 24th in total bases as a starting lineup – but that’s only one way to assess the problem. The issue is baked into their fundamental inability to polish talent at the MLB level – all the youngsters regress here until they get shipped out (Gunnar Henderson will be the next to go) – it’s exacerbated by an overmatched novice skipper who is under Elias’s thumb.
So lineups are reflective of what their super computer wants but not what is actually going on with these human beings as baseball players on a daily basis.
It’s a disaster, but owner David Rubenstein seems perfectly fine with it. Longtime MLB general manager Dan O’Dowd, among others who have appeared on “The Daily Flock Show,” is, um not so fine with it.
“If I own the team right now or I am in Rip’s (minority owner Cal Ripken Jr.) position where he is in the organization, I’m asking some like really hard questions,” O’Dowd, a former Orioles exec, said. “Like, what the heck’s going on in development, you know?
“Like, why aren’t these players turning out to be as good as their projection should be? Why aren’t we making players better at the big-league level? Why are the Brewers making players at the big-league level better? Why are the Rays making players better at the big-league level? And why are the Yankees making players better, and we’re not?
“Like, why aren’t we doing that? There has to be some accountability to that, because I don’t know how they need to fix this issue. because now they’re boxed with Gunnar Henderson where you’re probably right: They’re going to have to move him.”
So much of how we got here is tied to the various ways in which this regime has no clue how to interweave talent fabric and create an offensive tapestry that puts pressure on opposing starting pitchers and fielders. Elias wants to play favorites and some guys can fail to epic levels and constantly deface the top of the lineup, and others can never get a shot there; kids with red hot bats get sat down the next night because the computer doesn’t like their match-up.
An Atrocious Top Five
So, where do the Orioles rank in baseball from the 1-5 spots in the lineup? Where damage has to be at a premium? With the guys who the management team are trying to empower to get as many looks at the opposing pitching as possible? It’s typical Elias.
Let’s just start with fact they don’t put the ball in play nearly enough – .232 batting average in the top five spots, tied for worst in MLB – and they strike out entirely too much:
OPS: .723 – 25th SLG: .398 – 25th OBP: .325 – 15th AVG: .232 – T-last
K-Rate: 23% – 25th RBIs: 314 – 24th Runs: 355 – 16th HR: 95 – 17th
Yuck.
That’ll do it.
That will keep you from winning more than three games in a row all but one time as September approaches. That will keep you from seeing .500 since mid-April. That will undermine shockingly sharp pitching and allow a guy like Shane Baz, with a 3.42 ERA since May 20, to lead the league in losses (Orioles are 6-20 in his starts).
Elias was lazy and took shortcuts and relied on his database and didn’t really scout prep arms and just mostly selected college bats at the top of the draft year after year, racking up 100-loss seasons and tanking so hard they literally added a draft lottery (“They changed the rules,” because of the Orioles, as O’Dowd pointed out).
And for sitting through all of that, and years of Elias gaslighting you with tails of “liftoff,” and “a decade-long window” competing atop the AL East, Birdland gets a bottom-five starting lineup in MLB now about 130 games into Elias’s eighth year on the job.
Just promise me it’ll end one day. Promise me The Oriole Way will eventually come back.
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