After a remarkable 2023 season in which the Orioles won 101 games and stormed to an AL East title, a vastly different team showed up for the club’s first playoff appearance since all the way back in 2016. The net result was a very unsatisfactory ending to a great season of baseball in Baltimore.
In the irony of ironies, the Orioles hadn’t been swept in a series since last season before Adley Rutschman was called up, totaling 91 series. And yet, that is exactly what the Rangers did to the Orioles. The 7-1 series clincher for the Rangers ended a sweet season on a sour note.
Orioles starter Dean Kremer, a 13-game winner in the regular season, just didn’t have it and was pulled after recording five outs. It was the Rangers’ ferocious attack that did in Kremer, much like it did in Grayson Rodriguez in Game 2, when the Rangers scored five runs in the second inning. The contest was never in doubt after that. In the grand scheme of things, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly be on the mind of Kremer, with his family being in Israel.
He tried, but I’ll never be negative about this outing by Kremer.
Despite the bitter taste this series loss leaves in the mouth of Birdland, we had wondered if the Orioles were truly ready for this stage, no matter how great they were during the regular season. Often a young team will get to the big stage and not really know how to get it across the goal line the first time. Sometimes it’s the sting of such defeats that feeds the hunger necessary to eventually complete the task.
It’s not the time for a major analysis of what the team needs to take it to the next level. Suffice it to say, GM Mike Elias knows his pitching staff has to be a bit better in the rotation and deeper in a bullpen that will not have Félix Bautista available for all of 2024. And if Elias is honest with himself, he needs a little more of a veteran presence in his lineup.
The 2024 season will feature more positives. The club’s two top homegrown talents, Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, will improve and they may be joined by a couple other high draft picks from the past four seasons in Heston Kjerstad and Colton Cowser. (Kjerstad could be up from Day One, and Cowser got his first cup of coffee this summer.) And once again the Orioles have the No. 1 prospect in the game in Jackson Holliday, who very well could be ready for the big leagues by May or June.
For now, we’ll have to savor the club’s AL East flag in 2023. In a true oddity, the Orioles, Rays and Jays went 0-7 in the postseason despite everyone saying that the AL East is the best division in baseball.
One more slightly sour note to close it out for now: When the Orioles next get to the playoffs, they’ll be on an eight-game postseason losing streak — the four-game sweep by the Royals in the 2014 ALCS, the one-game wild-card loss to the Jays in 2016 and now this three-game sweep at the hands of a veteran-laden Rangers squad.
But the 2023 Orioles revived the good feelings about baseball in Baltimore. And that is a pretty darn big deal.
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