We Means It, Maaaaaan: The Baltimore Orioles of 2021

A truly anonymous bunch of who-are-theys while we wait for Adley -- but also a lot of young players whose future certainly isn't set in stone. They didn't finish last in 2020. Can they finish not-last again?

Starting the season with a commanding 3-game sweep of the Red Sox, who did finish last in 2020, is a good way to start.

up to 0.2% now

at a loss as to why fangraphs thinks the red sox are 15 games better

So you're saying there's a chance

well they've got Bogaerts, Devers, a real catcher, a couple potentially great pitchers returning from injury, and some high upside guys

we just have guys

weird to see all this outfield depth...not even accounting for positional tweeners.

If you're gonna get outhit 13-4 it's good to get those hits at the right times

If they blow this

phew

Satisfying win last night, though I can't say it feels like you're watching an almost-.500 team.

What if John Means is actually good though?

^-- Seriously, what if he is?

that's...good. definitely on a hell of a run.

matt harvey!

There are a lot of ways I love to win a ballgame but hilariously bad baserunning by the New York Yankees is right up there among the very best

mullins is 15 for 35 against LHP this year after giving up switch hitting

he was 14 for 111 against LHP trying to bat righty from 2018-2020

mullins is such a great story. like, even he were just to be just average offensively the rest of the season, that's still a really valuable guy to have w/ his defensive skills. him, hays and mckenna would be so fun to watch out there.

Another Mullins GWRBI

i've seen maybe three orioles games this year, which have led me to believe that mullins has a 1.500 OPS

John Means getting a W to kick off May Day is pic.twitter.com/sT6ZkWOwTW

— Lindsay Ballant (@lindsayballant) May 1, 2021

That so felt like the kind of game we would have given up on and lost 1-0 in recent years. God it would be great if Kremer could pitch this way all the time instead of briefly flashing his ability to do it and then losing track of it for weeks on end.

too busy arguing with people at work to even know there was a no-hitter going on, would've been the first O's one i'd ever seen

still think we should trade him at the deadline :)

What if John Means is actually good though?

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, April 18, 2021 3:29 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

^-- Seriously, what if he is?

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, April 25, 2021 5:42 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sort of sucks that the Orioles are probably going to finish last again while playing authentically kind of respectable baseball, but that's this division, four pretty good teams in here with us.

Cedric Mullins is arguably the best runner in the bigs pic.twitter.com/dFUhFa9LsQ

— Clinton Yates (@clintonyates) May 11, 2021

amazing hustle, but I’m not sure how this isn’t a three-base error

that is awesome; he rules

I am ready for the Means - Mullins - Hunter Harvey - Rutschman era

The bullpen has been pretty good but they are sure trying to waste another great Means start right now

What a brutal week. At least we get to play some other bad teams for a couple of series. And at least we had that comeback win against New York.

at a loss as to why fangraphs thinks the red sox are 15 games better

― mookieproof, Monday, April 5, 2021 12:05 AM (one month ago)

red sox have been 15 games better just since i wrote this

oops

Awesome, so we'll pace them the rest of the season

What the hell happened

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/12/04/sports/04orioles_CA0/popup.jpg

getting there...

if we get to 0-21 that can only mean good things for next year

Smart of SI to crop that picture so you can't see the bottom of the bat handle

on the plus side: adley went 5/6 with HRs from both sides of the plate in bowie's DH

AND the dbacks might actually win a game today. TANK BABY TANK

I get that baseball card reference.

Thank you I was hoping someone would

I actually have the very much less valuable but still worth a few bucks hasty replacement card, before the properly revised, more common one came out.

VICTORY

Orioles June is gonna be lit

3 in a row lol

break 'em up.

Loving the aggressive baserunning here.

Satisfying

mountcastle and santander getting hot make the team a little more tolerable to watch...cedric mullins is a joy, though.

Nice of the O’s to return the favor tonight. Satisfying.

congrats on beating matt harvey

rodriguez is only 21 but he's fanning like 15 per nine innings now in double-a. can he possibly be worse than the shit they regularly roll out? do we not want to see the best available players playing in the majors?

also sucks for cedric that he's not even eligible for arbitration until after *next* year -- he'll probably get a $10K raise to $600K after putting up 5 WAR this season. (and if he were eligible for arbitration *this* winter you know goddamn well he'd have been traded at the deadline)

anyway sorry -- the o's are just the most egregious current example of how fucked up the entire system is. the pirates/marlins/etc are little better if perhaps less blatant.

i really hope it all burns down this winter!

Seriously, fuck this

Why Not? '22

two homers off ohtani in the first!!!1!

won a game

what a moment

break em up

love this team again now

as cedric mullins goes, so go the orioles...but keegan akin w/ the out of the blue gem. what? 71 gamescore!

lol wasn’t he like 0-9 with an 8 ERA or something

Keegan Akin's last three starts: 17 IP, 5ER, 10H, 8BB, 14K, lift your head and breathe the fresh replacement-level air

aww

with two w's for Keegans two wins (so far!)

...and a happy john means to all who celebrate

big series win in da bronx

Keegan Akin Can't Lose

akin to be

you gotta hand it to hanser alberto

but then hanser is compelled to hand it back to cedric mullins

"zac lowther with a great outing lowers his season ERA to 6.91" is a thing Orioles fans say

Manny Barreda gets his moment

what a day

what a day

"zac lowther with a rough outing sees his season ERA tick back up to 9.92" is a thing Orioles fans say

Ugh. A game we should have won. Bullpen troubles.

seems crazy that cedric mullins is the first o ever to have a 30-30 season. maybe don baylor got closest?

It was pitching defense and the 3 run homer not pitching defense and the 30 stolen bases

fucking fleas.

In a fitting homage to classic Orioles baseball Mullins did indeed reach 30-30 with a 3-run homer

maybe don baylor got closest?

Thanks to Play Index I can tell you that the closest is Reggie Jackson in 1976, 27 HR and 28 SB. Baylor is the only other guy to get to 25/25. We are not counting Ken Williams, a 30-30 man for the 1922 St. Louis Browns.

most steals he ever had in a season...crazy how many bases that team stole for a weaver team. can't imagine ever sending belanger for how infrequently he got on base.

Thinking next year's thread title should be something along the lines of "Mullin it over: J.Q. and Eephus discuss whether or not the 2022 Orioles will be any good"

Like I don't even exist

lol

This is important context: The first time that a Baltimore season ticket holder renews for next season, that person will have committed more dollars to the 2022 Orioles than the club will have in payroll obligations. https://t.co/CvSX9kis1i

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 24, 2021

if only chris davis didn't retire

The quote tweets on that tweet are kind of insane. I'm an Orioles fan, and I will stay an Orioles fan through it all, but I cannot grasp the level of stannage required to spend your day bashing Buster Olney for stating the obvious fact that the Orioles are not trying to put a major league baseball team on the field. Like, it's a rebuild, I get it, but how can you be so in the tank that you insist THIS is the exact rebuild you want? Have these people not noticed that the 2017-21 Astros are not the only good team in the league, and all the other good teams didn't tank like this?

this isn't the exact rebuild i want... that one would involve us having a presence in latin america before like yesterday... but i'm extremely happy with how it's going

i latched onto orioles baseball in 2005 and had to wait 7 years for a winning team, after 7 consecutive years of never fully committing to a rebuild. imagine if i'd latched on in 1998. i never wanna go back there again. can't handle it. absolutely give me one more #1 draft pick before we start to improve. and i think we will improve next year, faster than people think. i don't doubt that the team will spend money again like they did 5 years ago. part of me wants them to sign one of the big shortstops, like the padres signing machado before they were good, but i can understand the windows not really aligning. maybe it isn't worth it to sign carlos correa and potentially waste his age 28 and 29 seasons.

one thing i do wish we were doing is spending money to tank better. i think that's really all a salary floor will do. take costlier chances on players that can be spun at the deadline. take a chance on trying to fix a robbie ray instead of a matt harvey. take on bad contracts from other teams in exchange for their prospects. but no one really does that.

and barring us obtaining the smartest FO on the planet (TB), i don't think it's actually possible to compete in the AL East without tanking. not without preexisting latin american talent or a lot of money. congrats to the giants for overcoming the dodgers without tanking but can you really count on that happening reliably? they still had four consecutive seasons losing seasons before this one and might go right back to it next year.

not to mention we don't have the rockies or dbacks or second half padres to rip apart. us vs the world babey. adley will take us there

i don't think it's actually possible to compete in the AL East without tanking. not without preexisting latin american talent or a lot of money.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

By the way I am an optimist too. I think the core of a good team DOES exist in the system now, if management is willing to spend around it. But I think we would have been in the same place with the rebuild if we'd been losing 90 games a year instead of 110 games a year, and it would have been less embarrassing. There is one guy, Rutschman, we truly got as a direct result of the ultra-tank, and that took one year of being horrible. Is the core of the next good team Heston Kjerstad and Colton Cowser? Or the guys we got in trade for our entire major league roster like Dillon Tate and Yusniel Diaz and Dean Kremer. Seems more like besides Rutschman it's John Means, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays, Grayson Rodriguez (drafted after 2017 when we were bad but not on purpose), maybe Keegan Akin if the second-half form is real... all guys we'd have even if we hadn't been running so much Pat Valaika and Richie Martin out there day after day after day.

What would you say the Rays are doing?

that was the first thing i said. they're the smartest FO in baseball. i'd like to have them as an FO, but that's not possible right now. "preexisting latin american talent" also applies to them.

but also.... even though they didn't outright tank, they had 4 sub-.500 years in a row not that long ago. i get annoyed with the "they've figured out how to compete every year" meme. also while we're on the subject of embarrassment, i'd be embarrassed if the orioles traded away every great hypothetical player they develop before they hit arb2! i would hate that.

i also think you're not being fair to kjerstad, who might be great, or cowser, who has been fantastic so far. not to mention coby mayo, who is absolutely hitting top 100 lists next year and was only signed because of that fat #2 slot money saved on kjerstad. don't care about the manny trade busts, they were made by a miserable lame duck GM who was already pretty bad at trades. elias somehow got much better returns for dylan bundy and jose iglesias. i'm counting those.

I would not be in the slightest perturbed if the Orioles had 4 sub-.500 years in a row (I've been a fan since the '80s, how could I be?) What's on the field right now is clearly something different than that!

Kjerstad and Cowser of course could be great! Any top-5 pick COULD be. Most aren't. If I believed Elias was uniquely good at turning high picks into valuable major league players, it might be a different story. Then again, if the Orioles had put a better team on the field, maybe we would have picked 7th in 2020 instead of 2nd and you know what? By all accounts Kjerstad would still have been available!

But the slot money wouldn't have been there to get Mayo and Baumler... I know everyone hates the underslot strategy but it really makes a lot of sense given the deranged slot value differences at the top of the first round. Pick 2 grants you way more cash to spend than pick 7 even if you don't spend it all on pick 2.

what if you don’t actually want to be granted more cash to spend

so now you're shaming the orioles for NOT spending money.......smh......

man we sacrifice the #1 pick for the good of humanity and the nats can't even finish the job i hate them

good news -- the orioles will not surpass the 1916 philadelphia athletics -- who finished 40 games behind the 76-77 washington senators -- for (what may be??) the biggest gap between last and next-to-last teams

it's not really the same, of course, and the 464-run difference in run differential may be another story