While it’s a bit of a sour note to go out as the AL’s runner-up, the best record to be sent home before the postseason, it’s ultimately hard not to view this season as a success. This wasn’t a team meant to even be good yet, let alone be a playoff contender all the way through September, and sealing up their first winning season since 2016 while seeing so many young players make strong impressions… those are all definite wins, even if they aren’t a playoff berth.
(It also probably helps that this is the first season with three Wild Card slots, so they wouldn’t have even been the runner-up prior to this year, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
And yet... it’s also not hard to feel like they could have made it. It’s like that Crash Davis quote from Bull Durham quote about the difference between a .300 hitter and a .250 being one extra hit a week; it wouldn’t take that many tweaks to get this team over the final hurdle. And despite being plucky up-and-comers, it’s also not difficult to find areas where they were very clearly leaving some opportunities on the table.
The one that I imagine most people are going to point to is going to be the trade deadline. Dealing veterans Trey Mancini and Jorge López away is going to look like giving up, to some extent, even if there is a solid logic behind both of those deals.
But I’m not sure that I fully buy that, either. The team looked fine in the immediate aftermath of their departure, with August being Baltimore’s second-best month by record, at 17-10 (only narrowly behind July’s 16-9). And neither of them looked especially dominant post-trade either, with Mancini’s Houston wRC+ dropping from 117 to 87 and López‘s ERA and FIP both ballooning in Minnesota. Sure, maybe they wouldn’t have fallen off that much had they stayed with the Orioles, but at the very least, I think it’s clear that just keeping them wouldn’t have been enough to get the O’s over the hump either.
September was definitely rough after going 47-31 over the three summer months. They actually kept a over-.600 record for half the season, a 97-win pace! And they absolutely stumbled after that, going 13-15 in the final full month of the season. But it also wasn’t their worst month of the season: in April, they went an abysmal 7-14. And May was also rough, a virtual tie with September at 14-16; it can be easy to forget now, after a serious attempt at the third Wild Card spot, but this was a team that still looked pretty hopeless two months into the season!
And that’s ultimately why it’s difficult for me to blame any midseason moves the team made. The biggest flaws that ultimately cost the team were all cast by Spring Training, and I was predicting it not just in that May piece, but as far back as December, when I noted how disappointing the team’s pre-lockout offseason had been.
