October success remains Orioles’ ultimate goal as memories of ALDS sweep return | ANALYSIS

The Orioles have new games in the clubhouse, but they went unplayed Monday and Tuesday. A five-game losing streak will do that to a team.

Baltimore wasn’t panicking, but it knows that every contest could be the deciding one between winning the American League East and not. The new pop-a-shot basketball game would have to wait for after a win.

It finally came Wednesday when Grayson Rodriguez and a triplet of home runs ended the club’s season-worst five-game skid. After, veteran catcher James McCann quickly flicked shots into the hoop — not half bad, but he picked the right sport — as Frankie Valli’s “Oh What A Night” blasted through the speakers.

“At this point, we’ve become accustomed to creating a winning culture in the clubhouse,” veteran center fielder Cedric Mullins said. “So, even with skids like this, it’s a matter of taking one day at a time. Just going out there ready to win, prepared to win.”

The victory was just one of approximately 100 (plus or minus five) the Orioles will likely win this season, and with the Texas Rangers coming to town Thursday for the first time since the AL Division Series, it’s important to not lose sight of Baltimore’s North Star.

Sure, a division title — the club’s second straight for the first time since 1973-74 — would be ideal over being a wild-card team. But last year’s sweep at the hands of the pesky and powerful Rangers was proof that how a team handles the highs and lows of the regular season doesn’t necessarily correlate with the fickle nature of playoff baseball.

The Orioles will almost certainly be playing baseball in October again this year. FanGraphs gives them a 96.9% chance to make the postseason and 30.3% odds to win the AL East. But how they perform in that pressurized small sample will — fairly or not — define this team more than how many games it wins during the regular season. Whether the Orioles win 88 games or 98 games or 108 games is far less important compared with whether Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and Corbin Burnes come up clutch in October.

Such is the cruelness of baseball, which features a grueling 162-game season only to have the ultimate winners and losers determined by series of three, five and seven games. On the flip side is the excitement that any team in the dance can take home the crown, as evidenced by a World Series last year between two wild-card teams that squeaked into the playoffs.

“There are plenty of teams that have won World Series, they get swept during the year,” veteran left fielder Austin Hays said. “You go through those things, you run into a team that’s hot, you get some bad breaks or you just don’t play well for a weekend or a couple days. It’s 162 games playing for months and months and months. At the end of the day, it’s three or four days, so just continue to do what we’ve done for the last few years.”

Perhaps the way the Orioles handled their recent losing streak is proof they’re aware of their greater purpose.

“We’re obviously not going to hit the panic button just because we lost five games,” Henderson said before Wednesday night’s 4-2 win over the Cleveland Guardians. “We’re going to go out there and continue to play as hard as we can.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise the Orioles hit a snag this month. From the time the schedule was released last year, Baltimore’s June slate was clearly a gantlet with only one day off out of 30 and games almost exclusively against playoff-caliber clubs. Despite the challenge, the Orioles have gone 14-11 in June with series wins over the Toronto Blue Jays, Tampa Bay Rays, Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies and Yankees.

“I think we’ve handled it well,” manager Brandon Hyde said before Wednesday’s win. “We have not played well the last five games. We haven’t put games together. Those things are going to happen throughout the course of the season. … But as a whole it’s been a good month.”

A five-game losing streak was foreign for Rutschman, Henderson, Jordan Westburg and the other young members of the Orioles. That’s because it’s the longest they’ve experienced in the big leagues. Baltimore’s longest skid last season was four games, with the most recent streak of at least five losses in May 2022 before Rutschman’s debut.

For the club’s veterans who played for the 2019 to 2021 Orioles, a five-game losing streak is nothing.

In August 2021, Baltimore lost 19 straight games. When that streak mercifully ended, the club was 39-86 on Aug. 25. The Orioles didn’t win their 50th game that season until Sept. 25.

The 2024 Orioles won their 50th game Wednesday — almost three months earlier than three years ago.

“I’ve been in a losing clubhouse, and I’ve been in a winning clubhouse,” Hays said. “I’ve seen the culture that comes from a team that loses a lot of games. I don’t see any of those bad habits or any of those red flags or tendencies that I saw when we were losing 100 games or losing 15 games in a row. I don’t see any of that in this clubhouse.

“There’s winners in here, and we’re doing everything that we should be doing.”