The Orioles Will Not Be Buyers And Will Not Be In The Playoffs: 3 Stats Explain It All

There are any number of reasons why the Baltimore Orioles won’t be flirting with the playoffs let alone participating in them. And why they will be selling anything they can at the deadline and not buying.

We told you this way back in late April/early May, when we began writing about this team daily after years of covering them and studying them in different formats. And there are so many data points and systemic flaws in this front office and roster to explain all of this – like the horrid fielding and baserunning – HYPER. Or the fact they can’t even hit terrible left-handed pitching.

Which all makes failed baseball czar Mike Elia’s claims back in April that he was bullish in this year’s team not being an awful as last year’s all the more laughable as they have identical records a 43-51 (he can’t fire puppet manager 3.0, though he did whack Brandon Hyde last May). And the fact that this puppet – Craig Albernaz – is arguably the most overmatched of the three, that’s also problematic.

(So you get fangraphs.com projecting them for 77 wins and roughly 16% chance of reaching the playoffs.)

But there are three endemic traits about this Frankenstein roster that we haven’t dissected enough that point to just how silly Elias was – even if only gaslighting his fans to try to sell tickets to a product that the state of Maryland is overwhelmingly rejecting – to opine about buying talent at the deadline. Sure, the overall record is putrid enough, and the road record is disgraceful, but these numbers bear considerable attention as well:

The Orioles Are 7-14 In One Run Games

They are the worst team in these games in MLB. And there is no end in sight. They pulled it off Thursday, but man was it ugly and their late-inning play is rarely clean.

Many of their core problems are interwoven into this dreadful stat. The manager stinks, has no feel for his pen (and in his defense the pen stinks) or when to pull a starter and he loves to manager a day or two down the road, which bites him all the time late in games.

They never had a closer, which is quite a problem in modern baseball. Ryan Helsley was overpaid and stunk and couldn’t throw strikes as their $14M closer, and Elias’s farm system stinks so bad he doesn’t have any arms worth a look in that spot.

As for his vaunted lineup, well they can’t score first or establish a legit lead enough, because they don’t really hit starting pitching, so chasing games will have you end up a run or two short quite a bit. They have produced three runs or less in eight of their last 12 games.

But this is also a losing clubhouse with a losing baseball mentality that only gets worse when a loser skipper and a loser GM constantly make excuses and refuse to criticize the most egregious offenders and underachievers – their golden boys Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson – and there is no accountability and guys keep coming up small.

It all shows up in this stat.

The Orioles Are 22-32 vs Winning Teams

This is who belongs in the playoffs, folks. Gotta at least one more than you lose. And those teams beat the crap out of the O’s.

The Orioles rank bottom seven in MLB in this stat, and, wouldn’t you know it, they are bottom seven in all of MLB in winning percentage since June 21, 2024. Now three of these wins came in a sweep of the White Sox in April, and Chicago came to Baltimore last week and showed which of those teams is more legit.

Problem is, too, everybody is in the mix in the AL for the most part, at least for a Wild Card, and the O’s are worse than almost all those teams. And those teams will be motivated and many will add elite players at the deadline which will make even better than the O’s. And Elias is perhaps at his most fraudulent at the deadline, so bake that into the cake moving forward when it comes to facing teams with winning records.

Oh, and the rest of the AL East has plenty to play for, so those divisional games matter. Tankathon shows the Orioles with the 12th-highest strength of schedule remaining for the rest of the season. Try that on for size, Elias.

The Orioles Can’t Win More Than Three In A Row

You aren’t digging a hole this big without getting hot. And these guys are hardwired to undermine themselves every four games, at least. When you have such inability to field your position and make the right decision and don’t know how to run the bases and you can’t utilize speed to generate runs, this is what you get.

Giving away the extra out and extra run, when you have so few individuals even meeting their expectations, is going to keep a team from ever getting hot. Leading the league in unearned runs wont get you to the postseason.

Entering play Thursday, there had been 91 instances this season – through roughly the first 90 games of each team’s schedule – in which an MLB team won at least four straight games. And the Orioles, of course, were not among them.

You can talk all you want about many games out of the last Wild Card they are and yada, yada, yada. They aren’t passing teams in the standings without some serious winning benders in the second half and they don’t have enough consistency in any aspect of play to make that reality.

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