Jury out on Orioles’ direction after a terrible month in a pivotal season
Team is 4-7 so far, players don’t appear to be producing — thrilling — during games
BALTIMORE — If the Baltimore Orioles’ game Monday night against the Toronto Blue Jays was a fan referendum on the team’s first 10 games of 2018, the verdict was decidedly not good. Only 7,915 fans showed up at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, by far the lowest attendance in the stadium’s history (save for the 2015 game played without fans in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray unrest).
Midweek games in April against unsexy opponents typically are the worst draws for any team all year, and it didn’t help that the temperature was 44 degrees — and dropping — at first pitch.
But Monday night’s announced attendance, shattering the previous low of 9,129 in April 2010, also offered a window into what appears to be a dwindling season-ticket base in Baltimore following last year’s last-place finish.
Every game and every season is a referendum of sorts on every player and every team, but it is difficult not to read even more import into this Orioles season, which sets up as a pivotal transition year for the direction of the franchise — from a roster full of soon-to-be free agents to a lameduck manager and general manager. And with the Orioles at 4-7 through 11 games, it is far too early to draw conclusions.
When the Orioles arrived home Sunday night at the end of a weeklong road trip to Houston and the Bronx, they were at the high point of the young season. After being swept by the defending World Series champion Astros, they had taken three of four from the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium — where they went 2-8 a year ago — including a pair of cathartic extra-inning wins.
They were just 4-6, but convinced they could compete in baseball’s most treacherous division.
“It was one of those team-uniting wins,” Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph said Monday of the 12inning win the day before at Yankee Stadium.
“We had two of those in one series. You can feel the cohesiveness of this club pulling together.”
The Orioles won that last game against the Yankees in the most improbable way imaginable. Closer Brad Brach, protecting a one-run lead in the bottom of the 12th, faced a bases-loaded, no-out jam, with Yankees sluggers Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton due up. But Brach induced a comebacker from Judge, leading to an unconventional 1-2-5 double play — with Joseph making the heads-up play of throwing to third — and struck out Stanton to end the game.
“Let’s face it. We caught the Yankees with three or four of their [injured] guys not there,” Orioles Manager Buck Showalter said Monday, downplaying the series win. “You need to beat them three out of four [under those circumstances]. I don’t want to make them that consequential ... We’re going to move on.”
Showalter knew better than anyone the hidden toll of those two extra-inning wins over the weekend — a bullpen that needed rest and reinforcements. On Monday night, Showalter had to stay away from most of his best relievers, and watched as a 2-1 deficit to the Blue Jays entering the ninth inning turned into a 7-1 loss.
In a sense, the Orioles are lucky to be 4-7, given the lack of production out of most of their star players.
First baseman Chris Davis, whose seven-year, $161 million contract signed in 2016 now appears to be the sort of awful deal that can cripple a franchise, has a .088/.225/.176 slash line and snapped a bat over his knee in frustration Monday night. Second baseman Jonathan Schoop, a first-time All-Star in 2017, is at .200/.231/.320. Right-hander Kevin Gausman, last year’s opening day starter, has an 8.00 ERA after two starts. Right-hander Alex Cobb, signed to a four-year, $60 million contract just three weeks ago, has been building up arm strength in Florida and will make his season debut on Saturday in Boston.
Among the Orioles’ core, only shortstop Manny Machado (.326/ .415/.565) and opening day starter Dylan Bundy (1.35 ERA) have exceeded expectations, and the team is being kept afloat by some fringe players at the bottom of the roster — such as Pedro Alvarez, who hit a grand slam to win Friday night’s 14-inning marathon in the Bronx, and right-hander Pedro Araujo, who threw 4 1/3 scoreless innings and struck out six in a pair of wins over the weekend.
Alvarez and Araujo are quintessential trash-heap pickups by Orioles GM Dan Duquette — the former a veteran slugger signed to a minor-league deal in late February, the latter a Rule 5 draftee who had made just one appearance above class A before this season. It is an image — a team built on a handful of bigticket stars and a bunch of castoffs — the Orioles have come to embrace.
“It’s been kind of a theme since I’ve been here,” said Joseph, the catcher who spent seven years in the minors before sticking in Baltimore. “We pick up what seems to be everyone else’s castoffs [and] they come to us and help us win games. It’s a great attribute [because] you have guys who come in with fire and determination. They’ve got a lot of the will to win. You can’t measure that. It’s one thing to be settled into a contract [with] security. It’s another to be fighting tooth and nail every day to keep your spot.
“When you have that, you have hungry players. When you have hungry players you get great performances.”
The rest of baseball will be watching closely to see how the Orioles fare in the first half of the season, because of the possibility of a July sell-off that could see pieces such as Machado and Brach made available for trades. Even in this age of tanking, the Orioles have so far resisted the temptation to enter a rebuilding stage, but one more disappointing season (or half-season) could be the impetus for a radical change in direction.
And presumably, the fans are watching closely as well, for the opposite reason — to see whether this is a team they can get behind in 2018. The referendum never ends.