We Means It, Maaaaaan: The Baltimore Orioles of 2021

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

He was actually doing ok this year until he faced us for the first time. Still hope he can pull it back together.

Ryan Mountcastle has three HR in three AB and will get an AB in the 8th.

Another hit at 100mph off the bat but just a single.

Fry walks in a run on a 3-2 pitch, bases loaded, 2 outs, Orioles holding a 2-run lead. This team, man, this team.

Welp.

Normally it’s the Jays doing this.

and looks like they might give that a go here in the bottom of the 9th!

hitting six homers and losing can’t happen all that often

Of course I stopped watching right after Mountcastle's single.

fahhhh

This team can't win without almost losing

THAT'S the magic of orioles baseball.

it's the reason i have an ulcer is what it is

Try being a Keys fan for pain.

I like when this team of nobodys and never-weres unloads its frustration on a reliever having a bad night

fuck you, have a ramon urias dinger

hahaha...do you SEEEE what happens?!

the truth is, urias has been hitting decently and pretty consistently in minors/majors since 2018, not a total no-hoper like some of the filler the orioles have been putting in the lineup

but anyway, never mind, we're good now

ho hum, sweeping away the trash.

Why are they doing this to me

colton cowser is not a real person.

Crisp game today, Matt Harvey had a good start, advantage was taken of defensive lapses

The "5th inning is here time for Jorge Lopez to give up some runs" thing is just getting silly now

Urias hitting .349 for July

Urias with the GWRBI today to complete the sweep of the cross-town Nats, McKenna, porous of bat but fleet of foot, comes scampering home from third on Ramon's groundout to notch the game-winner and the Orioles win after being down in the 9th for, I think, the very first time in 2021?

i like your patter, chief, but porous of bat? and cross-town is a stretch

cross-metropolitan-statistical-area work for you, hoss?

needs references to the parkway and its bricks, critter

Gotta love the walkoff walk courtesy of Ryan "porous bat" McKenna

This team can't win without almost losing

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, June 29, 2021 9:30 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Entered the bottom of the ninth, promptly let the Tigers load the bases with nobody out, still won

Oh yeah:

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

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, May 11, 2021 9:15 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

asdhklhfajkshlgwjhi

this just in: adley rutshcman is good. colton cowser is real and cannot be contained by the florida coast league. grayson rodriguez is the truth.

Chris Davis has announced his retirement. pic.twitter.com/3QKvErwTzn

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) August 12, 2021

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