Elimination Disappoints Baltimore Orioles While A Winning Record Draws Satisfaction

It was four years and two months ago when various members of the previous era of Baltimore Orioles stood in the middle of the hallway on the third base side at Yankee Stadium and said their goodbyes to signal the end of their successful run from 2012 through 2016 under Buck Showalter.

The Orioles were 47-115 in Showalter’s final season and were 32-74 when players such as Kevin Gausman and Jonathan Schoop attempted to hold back tears on their way to new destinations.

In the three years after those moments, 253 losses followed with many more projected on the way for this season, especially when they started 7-14 and were around 10 games under .500 following their second series against the Yankees in New York on May 25. It was a team who played a lot of competitive games and the perception seemed to be if they finished with something like a 72-90 record it would be incremental progress.

This year incremental progress became a summer run that captivated their own fans along with out of town baseball fans with a run highlighted by the “Chaos Coming” catchphrase to symbolize numerous close victories and several late comebacks along with closer Felix Bautista’s dynamic entrance in tribute to the HBO’s “The Wire” as part of the pomp surrounding some closer entrances in the sport.

Clinching a .500 record became official Friday night and being ensured of a winning record was officially a thing late Sunday afternoon when the Orioles closed out a 3-1 victory over the Yankees and capped a series of tough pitching against Aaron Judge, whose bid for 62 homers comes down to four games in Texas.

This year figured to be another long year where maybe progress would be measured in the form of something of going 74-88 or merely avoiding 90 losses. Not only did the Orioles avoid the 90-loss threshold they made it to the last full week of the season mathematically alive for one of the three AL wild-card spots in the expanded playoffs and doing so with a roster that contained two of the players (Dillon Tate and Dean Kremer) acquired in the deals for Gausman, Schoop, Manny Machado, Darren O’Day and Zack Britton.

On Friday night, the Orioles did their part, getting their 81st win at 10:21 pm They stayed alive for two hours, seven minutes and only were eliminated when Cal Raleigh’s homer set off bedlam in Seattle.

“It means I was a part of it,” Baltimore veteran starter and innings eater Jordan Lyles said Friday night. “A part of this transition this organization is going through myself and a couple of other veteran guys. We take pride in helping the young guys. We got a lot of young talented guys here, excited, happy, fortunate to be a part of it. But as older guys we might not be here in the future but this organization, the city of Baltimore is definitely in good hands.”

While Raleigh’s homer ended Seattle’s playoff drought that dated to a 12-3 loss in Game 5 of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 22, 2001, it also signaled the end of Baltimore’s playoff dreams – one that many began this season would not last much past the opening few weeks of their fourth season under manager Brandon Hyde.

The Orioles started the show the fruits of their farm system with Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson to go along with young holdovers Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle and it led to a captivating summer. Ultimately, the Orioles ran out of steam, a bad series in Boston after a late collapse against Houston signaled the beginning of the end and it became the disappointing reality of a satisfying year while Hyde watched the Mariners celebrate on his hotel television.

Still in the sting of being eliminated, there is something to be proud of and it’s a mood reflected by Hyde Friday night after a 2-1 win over the Yankees and then again roughly 11 hours after his team was formally eliminated.

“Definitely disappointing. I stayed up saw what happened there in Seattle last night,” Hyde said about 11 hours after the reality of elimination sank in. “So congratulations to them. Very, very disappointing.

“But yeah, I mean I am proud of how our team has played this year and how we’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations, stayed in it until October 1, so pretty cool for our guys but yeah as a competitor I wanted to be in the playoffs. I want to experience those things. I want our guys to but we gave it a good run.”

Teams have shown marked improvement from 100-loss seasons before and this was similar to the magical 1989 Baltimore run when the team who started 0-21 the previous years wound up going 87-75 and staying in the AL East race until the final week.

And although the sting and disappointment hovered in the air around the Orioles and perhaps seemed to be reflective of their 8-0 loss and rough time against Nestor Cortes on Saturday, it was easy to see the satisfaction of going from 110 losses to a winning record.

“Yeah it’s everything,” Baltimore starter Kyle Bradish said after striking Judge out twice to conclude his rookie season. “Nobody wants to have a losing season. This being my first year, just everything I could possibly have wanted to be a part of.

“I think it’s awesome,” Orioles reliever Bryan Baker said. “I think when you put yourself in that position after all the work we put in and expectations we’ve overcome, I think securing that is pretty cool and I think something we should be proud of for sure.”