With all the news of conference realignment in college football and free agency in the NBA, your attention may be elsewhere, but something special is brewing in Major League Baseball.
Don’t look now, but the worst team in baseball for the last five years is making some noise.
The Orioles are currently 44-44…That may not stick out to you that much, but they are presently on a league-best nine-game winning streak. They have climbed out of obscurity and into the Wild Card hunt. The O’s find themselves just two games out of the Wild Card as the All-Star Game approaches.
Why is that significant? Well, here is some context for you…The Orioles have not finished above .500 since 2016. In fact, from 2017 to 2021, the Orioles had a record of 253-455. That is really horrid and is good for a winning percentage of .357.
Take out the 75-87 2017 season when they unraveled in the back half of the year and that record is 178-368 with a winning percentage that plummets to .326.
After the Orioles have not made it to the postseason since 2014, this team is a hot finish this week from having a Wild Card spot at the All-Star break, and perhaps the craziest thing about them is that they are doing it for pennies on the dollar.
The Orioles share a division with some of the biggest spenders in baseball. The Yankees and Red Sox will always spend near the top of the league, mainly to keep pace with each other. The Blue Jays have seen their young core in Toronto and figured it is time to try to spend a little with the big boys.
When you look at the payroll in the American League East, it puts this push by the Orioles into perspective…
At the top, no surprise, the Yankees lead the way with a bloated team salary of $250,427,812. Props to them because it has worked as the Yankees carry the best record in baseball at 61-26.
The Red Sox are next, with a team payroll of $203,392,844. They always try to stay within arm’s length of their rival and find ways to beat them elsewhere, and it has worked as they have dominated the last couple of decades in the division.
The Blue Jays are a trendy pick in the division and are somewhat viewed as the new kids on the block. Their payroll is starting to fall in line with the Red Sox, with a team salary of $171,638,294 this season.
Heck, even the Rays, notorious for being cheap, are spending more than they usually do. Their payroll has risen to $88,790,354, not far above half the salary of the Jays.
Now…we get to the Orioles…Actually, not really. To quote Brad Pitt in Moneyball, “there’s 50 feet of crap, then there’s” the 2022 Orioles. This team that is fighting for a playoff spot? Yeah, their team salary is $45,495,350.
Yes, you read that right. The Orioles are trying to compete with a payroll less than a fifth of the size of the Yankees—eighteen percent the size of it, to be exact.
The Orioles’ highest-paid player is Trey Mancini. He will make $7.5 million this season. Where does that rank in the division in terms of highest paid players? Twenty-second. Yes, he is the 22nd highest-paid player in the division.
This Orioles team is the modern-day Moneyball right now. Just four players on the roster are making more than $1 million this season. That is unheard of in professional sports today. By the way, the Yankees have 19 players making over $1 million. Ten of those 19 are making over $10 million.
The roster is full of players that you do not know. Their three most famous players are cancer-survivor and Home Run Derby participant Trey Mancini, rookie sensation out of Oregon State Adley Rutschman and Roughned Odor.
If you are wondering what Odor is most famous for…He is the guy who cold-cocked José Bautista in 2016, starting a brawl.
So…as this season progresses, watch out for the O’s. They are a fun story. They are the vastly overmatched underdogs clawing and scrapping with the giants in the league, and right now…they are holding their own.
Since June 1, the Orioles sport the fourth-best record in the A.L., going 21-14.
The Orioles have done it with nothing that jumps out to you as ground-breaking or even elite. The starting pitching is not great, but led by Tyler Wells, the rotation has found some consistency. They are not consistently great. They are consistently good enough to win.
The bullpen has been strong. Jorge López has led the chard with a 1.74 ERA in 41.1 innings and an All-Star nod. Behind him is an army of strong bullpen arms with solid workloads and low ERAs like Felix Bautista, Dillon Tate, Joey Krehbiel and Keegan Akin.
On offense, a young core led by Ryan Mountcastle, Trey Mancini, Adley Rutschman, Cedric Mullins and Austin Hays has collectively gotten better. Mancini has been consistent, and Mullins has gotten hot. Rutschman shook off a slow start to improve mightily, but Mountcastle has taken an enormous step forward over the last month and a half. His OPS has been well over .900 since the start of June.
But there is one final piece that cannot be really accounted for…The Orioles have been awfully fortunate over this winning streak, and some might even say it is unsustainable. Over the nine-game streak, the Orioles have outscored opponents by just 16 runs. Every game is close…and three walk-off wins in the streak would echo that conclusion.
The hitting and pitching have shown up when other has not. The clutch gene has been there for their walk-offs, especially last Friday against the Angels. Down a pair in the ninth against a top-notch closer in Rasiel Iglesias with two outs and nobody on, the O’s strung together four hits in a row, three of which in two-strike counts, to win the game capped off with a Trey Mancini walk-off single.
So there you have it…The Orioles have gotten better on a budget, and they are putting up a good fight against the goliaths in the American League. Sprinkle some luck, some complementary pieces, some competent pitching and some heating up bats and this team has found itself right in the thick of a playoff hunt days before the All-Star break.