It’s a season of ups and downs. And blowing into Chicago to sweep the White Six was an orange tonic and crush that the Orioles needed after that trio of turds at the Confluence against the Pirates.
No need for full civic therapy just yet but the Orioles looked sloppy, strikeout-prone and short on answers in Pittsburgh and then rebounded nicely to sweep the White Sox, reminding everyone that baseball seasons are not written in the cold of early April.
The Birds are now 6-6, second place in the AL East, and that feels about right for what they’ve shown so far: certainly a flawed club but not a bad club, but a .500 team with some real promise and some real problems.
Five hundred says you’ve got enough life to hang around, enough flaws to keep you from swaggering, and enough questions that no one in that front office should be comfortable just because they beat a bad White Sox team in weather more suitable for hockey tryouts than baseball.
Luke Jones and I concurred this morning on radio that the Orioles played well enough to beat a bad team – and that right now, we’re all perfectly okay with that.
There was something almost beautifully ridiculous about the whole South Side scene: the cold, the empty seats, the strange April light, the sense that if you hit the ball hard enough it might freeze before it reached the gap. And yet the Orioles found a little rhythm. Brandon Young gave them five scoreless innings to start the series. Gunnar Henderson hit the big homer on Tuesday. Taylor Ward finished the sweep with a four-hit day on Wednesday and continues to look like one of the few Orioles hitters who actually arrived to the season on time. That matters because, right now, a lot of the lineup still looks like it’s waiting for the coffee to kick in or the opportunity to matter for their own nascent careers.
Henderson and Ward have been carrying too much of the offensive personality. Pete Alonso still hasn’t really arrived. Adley Rutschman has been fine, which is damning him with praise around here. Coby Mayo is pressing. Colton Cowser still looks like a hitter waiting for someone to throw him a fastball he can punish. Jackson Holliday and Jordan Westburg haven’t been part of the nightly solution yet but they feel sorely missed and noticed. So no orange cartwheels here over a sweep of the White Sox. But if you can get through a road series with two hot bats, decent enough pitching and just enough bullpen nerve to survive, you take the wins and the broom and move home feeling a lot better than when the Pittsburgh thud landed on Sunday afternoon.
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Now the really bad news: Zach Eflin underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery on Wednesday. That isn’t just a line on the injury report. That is a foundational hit to a team that already needed its pitching depth to hold together with duct tape and good intentions. I thought he might’ve given them 160 to 180 good innings. Elias sold me on Eflin as a stabilizer, as a guy who makes his 25 or 27 starts and keeps the whole thing from wobbling. You cannot sell me on losing him in the second week of April and pretending it doesn’t change the math. It does, no matter how decent Cade Povich and Brandon Young looked earlier this week. It changes everything about how much this team needs from those guys, and ultimately another big opening for Dean Kremer, the bullpen and every other arm Mike Elias is trying to conjure from the baseball bullpen relief science lab.
And that gets us to the real Orioles conversation: the Willy Wonka bullpen and the eternal search for enough pitching. Elias clearly believes he can find value there, build it cheaper, patch it quicker and outsmart the market. Sometimes he’s right. Sometimes it looks like a magic trick performed with a lighter and a can of gasoline. The bullpen held up in Chicago well enough, and that deserves credit. Edwin Nunez and Rico Garcia will be an experiment until they’re not. But if the rotation keeps handing over 4-2 games and the defense keeps playing like every ball in play is a small emergency, then this thing gets stressful fast. Because that’s the other truth: good teams survive cold bats with pitching and defense. I’m not fully convinced the Orioles can survive that way yet. The defense doesn’t feel like it’s going to provide any sure things, literally anywhere on the diamond.
So, wrap the broom around that ChiSox sweep in a tidy little orange bow and put it where it belongs: as a slight market correction, certainly not a coronation. The Giants arrive at Camden Yards at 5-8, the Diamondbacks follow at 6-6, and the Orioles have six home games now to prove they’re more than a moody little April weather report as the weather turns to quite pleasant in downtown Baltimore.
Beat the teams you should beat. Catch the baseball. Get enough innings.
Let Gunnar be the star. Let Ward – and somebody, anybody else to keep setting the table. And let’s see whether .500 is just a temporary address or the truth of the summer.
Because after Pittsburgh and Chicago, we know this much: they’re alive, they’re imperfect, and the next week gets to tell us whether they’re merely treading water or finally ready to swim a little here against these fair-to-middling National League teams that are supposed to get us energized about interleague play at The Yard.
