The Tanking Will Continue Until Morale Improves: the 2022 Baltimore Orioles

Dang lucky you being at that game -- how was turnout?

Sounds like no Adley today, booooooooo

turn out was good! 23K paid.

happy adley day, friends.

much excited

i like the new era

Nice comeback tonight, down 6 in the 7th at Fenway, end up winning by 4.

Heck of a night for Tyler Wells!

This game is going well but that moment where it's up to McKenna and Owings to get the runs in is kinda hard to take

Grayson Rodriguez has been diagnosed with a Grade 2 right lat strain, Mike Elias said this morning, which likely won't pin him to a return to action until September.

Elias wouldn't rule anything out, but focus is on Opening Day 2023. There's a chance Rodriguez is done for '22.

— Zachary Silver (@zachsilver) June 5, 2022

Not feeling the morale improve tbh

should probably tank for a bit longer

This sucks but I don't see any reason this would have been any less likely to happen if he were in Baltimore.

Anyway, I definitely think morale is improving!

xp true, but he’d be getting paid and accruing service time

elias is no doubt secretly thrilled

Yes, good point, I was thinking about "to what extent does this timing suck for the Orioles" but the extent to which it sucks for GR himself is much greater

Maybe the DL Hall call-up comes earlier now, I dunno

beginning to wonder if gunnar henderson isn't up before the end of the year.

Holy moly, I did not expect a promotion this early for him (and Westburg too)

interesting to compare him this year to witt last year...witt's almost exactly a year older.

Gunnar homered in his first game in Norfolk

pic.twitter.com/bfwdzkbmeY

— Matthew Sprague (@MSprague518) June 9, 2022

stowers finally debuting! as a vax replacement lol

adley bomb off of berrios. guys, he may be adjusting.

If the Orioles (12-9 in June) win 2 of their next 5 games, they will claim their first full winning month since August 2017. It's been almost 5 years!!!!

— Matt Kremnitzer (@mattkremnitzer) June 25, 2022

also:

have allowed one run on 13 hits in their last 27 innings

have the same number of wins as the white sox

better record over the last 10 games than the yankees

not allowing myself to get excited. it still feels like a lot of the reasons we're doing better this year are going to get traded at the deadline... bullpen guys, mancini, santander. and i wonder if players like mullins and hays are going to still be around by the time the younger guys are settled. right now the only big 'post-tank' pieces are adley, mountcastle and bradish, still a lot of holes to fill.

they broke the glass on stowers. definitely curious to see when he next comes up. definitely seem to be avoiding trial by fire for the sexier mi prospects, but w/ jones out of the picture, maybe vavra's next man up? pretty amazing what westburg and henderson are doing at nrofolk, though.

don't think stowers is up full time until santander is traded, or maybe mancini but they probably want him in the outfield. i'm not pinning a lot of hope on stowers though.

cowser, mayo and norby all promoted to AA despite not blowing the competition away at aberdeen. wouldn't be surprised to see any of them hit the ground running simply because ripken park is a cavern and bowie is a bandbox.

btw, rutschman above 100 ops+/wrc+

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-orioles-arent-good-but-they-are-interesting

Orioles are winning a lot of fun games lately.

so...morale's pretty good!

.500 BABY

The orioles may be good *and* interesting

Certainly makes the wild card race more fun

They are not, in any objective sense, a good team, but there is a lot of fun stuff going on. I think my pre-season picks of Mullins, Rutschman, Rodriguez, Hays, Mountcastle and Mateo to be interesting things about the 2022 O's was not THAT far off, and would be closer if not for injuries to Means/Rodriguez, but I totally missed the coming together of the bullpen and the Tyler Wells Experience and Mancini coming back this strong and of course Rougned Odor just kind of being fun as hell despite not being that good at baseball per se.

Ten in a row, my goodness.

i mean, MAYBE i could have seen dean kremer stepping up like he has, but the efforts of tyler wells and spenser watkins have been astonishing.

Looks like morale has improved!!

Second straight winning month! Even dropping two of three to the Yankees last week they never really seemed outmatched by the Yankees the way they sometimes have in recent years.

Also, can we all agree tha, despite not really being able to hit, Jorge Mateo is the most fun Oriole in a while?

I also want to say that my description of Austin Hays at the top of the thread as "intermittently exciting" has held up quite well

it's a very fun team. energy to spare. team speed fer crissakes!

fourth place!

To be fair this team has actually FINISHED a season in fourth place ahead of the cellar-dwelling Red Sox in recent memory, it's the winning record I'm more excited about

It’s crazy that the O’s were the butt of jokes for the last couple years about how bad they are (I remember fangraphs a year or two ago “adjusting” their pre season projections to closer align with fan feedback, and every team was bumped up to 162 wins, except the O’s who were at zero) and then watching a talented team like the BoSox tank below them has been nothing short of amazing.

The Jays announcers--even Schulman, I think--were so condescending to Baltimore early in the year that I would wince. As they speculated on where the Jays stood in relation to the Yankees, Rays, and Red Sox, they treated the Orioles like a Triple-A team.

Everyone did!

adley: 23 singles, 20 doubles

23 singles, 22 doubles