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

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

how do you guys feel about these trades

i'm okay w/ them, personally. povich and johnson are supposedly future mid-rotation guys and am curious if they can work whatever hoodoo they threw on bautista w/ cano.

wondering why we didn't trade santander of all people but i guess the market wasn't going to be kind to a corner OF with a sub-.800 OPS

i'm annoyed that we have legitimate prospects who are either wasting away in AAA (stowers) or called up and barely starting (vavra) in favor of non-prospects. i don't get it - if you're going to sell at the deadline, that's an obvious indication you should be using the remaining 2 months to get ML experience for those players and see what you have before the bigger and better prospects (henderson, westburg, cowser) force their way up and take their spots.

anyway no movement on adley doubles vs singles watch but he did walk 3 times today

wondering why we didn't trade santander of all people but i guess the market wasn't going to be kind to a corner OF with a sub-.800 OPS

He's hitting better than Mancini, he's younger, and has more team control. I thought it was more likely they'd trade Santander and not Mancini because Mancini has a longer history with the Orioles and two months of Mancini was not gonna bring back much (well I was right about that at any rate.)

so it does not bother you that, 1.5 games out of a playoff spot, the o's sold?

i am familiar with this scenario in that circa 10 years ago the pirates, who didn't quite feel ready to compete, at least gestured at the possibility by acquiring, say, derek bell or justin morneau for little to nothing

i guess my question is at what point will the o's -- as we've been wondering about oakland for years, but they have at least on occasion stepped up -- commit to winning now rather than in some nebulous future? what will that take?

(also very familiar with claiming a wild card and being immediately bounced by red-asses fwiw)

so it does not bother you that, 1.5 games out of a playoff spot, the o's sold?

Oh it totally bothers me! I think what we got back is pretty worthless relative to the diminishment in enjoyment of the 2022 team, wild card or not.

i'm not really bothered by it at all. i don't think this run is really sustainable, especially the starting pitching. i think there are a some young pitchers who are gonna wear out. and i'll die before i recognize the third wild card so if we just barely sneak into it with a middling record i will pretend the season is over.

we're also still technically rebuilding, in that there are at least 4 position player prospects in the high minors and a couple more who may be there soon who are all projected to be major league regulars and they need to be promoted and given time to work out their kinks. not even talking about stowers and vavra there. i'm sure some prospects will be traded but you shouldn't really do that before any of them have been promoted aside from the big one, right?

and at the same time we have two players (urias and mateo) who have sort of broken out recently and need to be given time to really see if they're future full timers. and neither of the two major pitching prospects have come up and worked through their obligatory 6.00 ERA rookie seasons.

everything about this roster just feels too transitory to start filling in with permanent pieces from other teams.

I'm not bothered by them not going out and acquiring players for prospects! I just would have been very happy to see them stand pat. A team is a weird alchemy and they've lucked into something that works. I would have been happy to see this group play their way to 75-87, not get a WC, whatever -- I've just been having a good time and want to keep it going!

adley rutschman has stolen his second base of the season

it was part of a double steal, but still

according to fangraphs he has added 2.9 runs via his baserunning, which is second on the orioles, just ahead of cedric mullins

should point out that i don't even think that's fluky, he looks genuinely fast out there (for now) and makes good baserunning decisions, after all the prospect reports gave him the standard "he's got catcher speed, what do you expect"

when matt wieters came up he ran like albert pujols runs now

just a very good athlete. haven't seen data on pop times, but he looks very agile behind the plate.

2 singles and 2 walks today. no doubles :(

doing this for every game of his career btw

Five in a row now, admittedly at the expense of the Pirates and Reds. Loving this.

this is going to be a fun series.

manny machado debuted 10 years ago today

2-for-4 with a triple in an 8-2 loss to the royals

I think Gunnar will be up this year but not long enough to kill his rookie status and prevent him from netting a draft pick next year

So when is that?

I've read the 23rd

I'll put my money on the 29th or 30th in case we're still in the hunt for the easy wild card

still waiting to see what they do w/ that extra 40 man roster spot. have to imagine it goes to stowers or henderson, but...who knows?

stowers is just twiddling his thumbs hitting grand slams in Norfolk, he's 24, what does he have to learn at this point?

it's nuts w/o even getting into what guys like cowser and norby at bowie.

Officially half owners of the mickey mouse wild card

DL Hall reportedly joining the big team!

DL Hall is expected to start tomorrow night for the Orioles, a source tells The Baltimore Sun https://t.co/NX7bjVGGKG

— Andy Kostka (@afkostka) August 12, 2022

yay!

...but please promote stowers and gunnar henderson, next!