O No, Not Again

...so remember a couple weeks ago when the Orioles weren't in last, and pretty much every sportswriter out there was just confusedly checking their playbooks? Like 'THIS is a second place team?'

Yeah, so that's not happening anymore. As the big, bad Marvel villain Thanos would say, the Orioles' record is now perfectly balanced...as all things should be.

...and by that, I mean that a whole bunch more losses have been added to their record.

Look, I want to say nice things about this O's team. This isn't like 2014, where I was salty that they were better than the Yankees, wrote a blog post about how the team was only in 1st by default, and subsequently got chewed out by every Oriole blogger on the 'sphere. I'm not salty when I say this Orioles team is bad. I just read the standings.

What I CAN say is that this O's team does have a few more decent players than the 2018 squad had. Last year, once Machado left it became a dire quest to find someone with a positive WAR that resembled 'good'. This year? Trey Mancini and Dwight Smith are both playing really well, Jonathan Villar is a solid infield bat, the best starter on the team is a guy no one's heard of named John Means, and...I guess Stevie Wilkerson is a good bench bat.

There. That's a lot of good things I can say about this team. The problem isn't that they have a lot and nothing's working; it's not like San Francisco. The problem is that they don't have anything...at all. And it's good that the good players they do have are doing well, but...the Orioles don't have much else. Rio Ruiz is their everyday third baseman, and that should say everything you need to know. Dan Straily is still being trusted for a rotation spot. It's a team in disarray, but it would be worse if they didn't have Mancini.

This may be where the O's are gonna be for the next few months. Not bad enough to chase Miami, but not good enough to reckon with the other four.

Coming Tomorrow: HEEYYYY, SPEAKING OF MIAMI...uh, their catcher.