Duquette must act soon to stop O’s free fall

If you want, you can fall back on the oftcited baseball truism that a team is never as good as it looks when it is on top of the world and never as bad as it looks when it is playing the way the Orioles have for the past several weeks.

Not sure that applies right now.

The Orioles have been shockingly bad for an extended period. The pitching staff is in shambles. The Norfolk Shuttle has jumped the rails. The supposedly high-powered offense looks as if it’s running on flashlight batteries. And, of course, the roster has been depleted by several significant injuries.

It’s pretty clear from the posts on social media that fans are frustrated and discouraged, as well they should be. When you go from owning the best record in the major leagues (through May 9) to owning one of the worst records in baseball over a period of more than a month, it’s fair to take a hard look at where the team is, where it might be going and, yes, who’s to blame for this mess.

Remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was extolling executive vice president Dan Duquette for some of the strong moves he has made on the way to building the best regular-season record in the American League over the past five years. Well, he still deserves credit for all that. But he also has to wear this dramatic tailspin and figure a way out of it before the season unravels to the