It’s a bit of a paradox, I guess.
The Baltimore Orioles can win the World Series. It’s just that they’re not good enough to win the World Series.
It’s difficult to reconcile that the team that just won series against the two best teams in baseball (the Phillies and Yankees) is the same team got obliterated over the course of three games against the Astros in Houston. John Sterling would say “that’s baseball, Suzyn.” And he’d be right. We all know better than to overreact to any of it. While some of us were parade planning after a 17-5 Orioles win in The Bronx, others of us were getting yelled at for diminishing the value of “one series in June.”
As my friend Ryan Ripken would say, “The O’s are fine.” Yes, it was a dreadful weekend in Space City. The pitching was bad throughout and the offense had a weekend-long hangover reminiscent of that time you went to a football game at Ole Miss. But it was one weekend. They’re plenty capable of turning around and winning more series against more good teams this week and making us all forget it ever happened.
The Orioles are, indeed, fine. Like I said, they could win the World Series.
But the Orioles aren’t at all good enough to win the World Series.
And you know what I mean. As much as we’ve wanted to believe in the team’s depth and their ability to withstand injuries, they simply don’t have enough on the pitching side to viably believe they can end a 41-year World Series drought as constituted. It is asking too much. Not of Corbin Burnes, who just finally had his first bad start in orange and black. It’s asking too much of the rest of the group. Grayson Rodriguez, perhaps you’ve forgotten, is still in the midst of his first full season as a major league starter. He has of course shown us moments of absolute brilliance but, as we were reminded in the opener in Houston, is still experiencing growing pains into a “top of the rotation” type of role.
Cole Irvin has had a better season than we expected, but, if the season ended today, he’d be slated to be the starter for a deciding Game 3 of a wild-card playoff series. Apologies, I should have offered an anxiety warning. If not Irvin, perhaps a returning Dean Kremer could make that start. Sure, he’s probably been more of a No. 4 or 5 starter in his career but he does have a bulldog mentality. He also gave up five runs while recording just two outs against the Lehigh Valley IronPigs this weekend, perhaps because he thought the news just wasn’t bad enough for Orioles fans.
Even if Cade Povich were to step up and show himself to be a consistent big league starter for the rest of the season, he’d probably run out of innings by the time the team got to the playoffs (his 126.2 last year were the most he’s thrown). And Albert Suárez is heavily flirting with the phrase “back into a pumpkin.”
But the Orioles are still viable World Series contenders because we know the trade deadline is the great equalizer. This issue can still be addressed … and must be. In a way, this is the first time Orioles GM Mike Elias truly goes under the microscope. He’s had a fairly charmed tenure in Charm City. He entered when the team had no expectations and the fan base was willing to give him time to build … and build he did!
Still, we don’t know about Elias’ ability to turn a good team into a title team. We can’t! He wasn’t in charge when the Astros won in 2017. The 2022 Orioles were on the cusp, but it was understandable that he chose to trade away instead of acquire given where they were in their process. Last year, he flatly whiffed at the deadline with his acquisition of Jack Flaherty.
In a world where they never traded for Corbin Burnes, perhaps we would wonder out loud if the sheer number of pitching injuries might suggest that this team simply couldn’t win a World Series and it wouldn’t be worth dealing away valuable pieces. But they made the Burnes trade. (Good thing, too. Where would they be without him?) He’s here for a year. Because of that, this year has to matter. There’s no way around it. They have to go for it.
We can discuss how much of a seller’s market it is and how basically all of the National League is still in the playoff race and how difficult that makes this and how the Orioles are right to not want to part ways with their biggest prospects until we’re blue in the face. It’s all true. It all matters. But none of it changes the Orioles’ reality. They are ready to win a World Series, but they can’t win the World Series. They must bolster their pitching with at least one front-ish of the rotation starter and probably a couple of bullpen arms. It won’t be cheap. No one wants them to recklessly throw prospects away.
But there’s no wiggling away from this. It has to happen and Mike Elias will be judged (not singularly at all, but judged nonetheless) by it.
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