At lunch last month with a former Baltimore Oriole, I asked an obvious question: “What’s with these guys? Why is their record so bad?”
“Why?” he said, with a look somewhere between sadness and anger. “Because that’s who they are.”
In other words, they’re not the ballplayers we had been told they were. We were told they were superstars, and they were not. We were told there might be a World Series this fall in Baltimore, and there certainly will not be.
The front office people who drafted these players, and nurtured them through the farm system, and then sent them out to play, seem to have misjudged a bunch of them. And in a week in which the last-place O’s have begun trading veterans for prospects in acknowledgement of the most disappointing season in their 70-year history, this much is clear:
It’s no longer “because that’s who they are.”
It’s becoming “because that’s who they were.”
Over the next few days, watch them coming and watch them going — including the fans who will be going.
As the ballclub stumbles into the final one-third of the season, did anyone notice the attendance at Sunday’s game against the Colorado Rockies? This was the day after the O’s annihilated the Rockies, 18 to 0. Who could ask for anything more?
But the ballpark was two-thirds empty on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. The victories are coming too late for people to care. The crowd was announced at 16,407, but the number read like somebody’s imagination. A bunch of those seats must have been sold in advance, and the ticket holders didn’t bother to show up.
As this is written on Monday, July 28, the Orioles are 23rd in major league attendance out of 30 teams. They’ve drawn 1,140,447. At this pace, 23,274 per game, they might draw about 1.8 million fans by the time the year’s up — except, what’s the likelihood they’ll continue to draw at this pace?
This is a franchise that once drew well over 3 million people a year. And we can blame the drop on the usual factors. Washington getting a franchise that pulled away thousands of former O’s fans. This summer’s worst weather that seems to have coincided with most of the Orioles’ home stands.
But who do we blame for the miserable performances on the field?
Evaluating baseball talent is not an exact science. How do you explain the drop-off of an Adley Rutschman, once seen as the future of the franchise but now seems a full year’s enigma? How do you explain a Gunnar Henderson who had 37 homers a year ago and this year has 38 runs batted in?
If there is an explanation, we’d love to hear it. In the meantime, we’re left with the former Oriole’s concise answer to why this team has looked so bad: Because that’s who they are.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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