How can you not be anything but proud of this team?

[Roy Firestone]

17 straight games...no days off...the team is exhausted and lose 2 games on walkouts when their bullpen failed...their pen is completely fried...but John Means gives his team a 7 and a third innings, flirts with a no hitter and in ONLY his third start after missing a year and a  half... he is dominant...then today with Kyle Gibson needing to help rest his team's pen also gives us 7 innings in a dominant start...The Birds after dropping two in Cleveland, one of them a crushing walk off...this team ends up 4-3 on a road trip and is now just 3 in the magic number column to win the AL East..the same team that two years ago lost 110 games...I mean, c'mon...how can you NOT love these guys?

[baltfan]

Turned out that 9-8 on that stretch was good enough.

[Gurgi]

Seems Tampa is just as tired as we are.  Which is a good thing.  

[accinfo]

The Orioles are 14-9 in September.  That is a .609 winning percentage.  Tired or not they are doing just fine.  

[baltfan]

4 hours ago, accinfo said:

The Orioles are 14-9 in September.  That is a .609 winning percentage.  Tired or not they are doing just fine.  

If they have a winning month, they would have had a winning month every month of the season. 

Edited September 25, 2023 by baltfan

[Rbiggs2525]

Every time you get down or concerned they bounce back. Probably the most mentally strong team I can remember.

[TonySoprano]

What I'm proudest of is we're doing it with homegrown talent.
Everybody has struggled this month

September

TOR 14-8
MIN 14-8
O's 14-9
TB 13-10
TEX 12-10
HOU 8-13

Tampa Bay has been on our tail all month, and we've stayed in first.   Any other team would have the division locked up with 97 wins.   But we're fighting to the end.

TB and BAL, two heavyweights in the middle of the ring, trading shots.   

Edited September 24, 2023 by TonySoprano

[vab]

Professionals, man. They forget about the losses but they forget about the wins as well. The only thing that matters is the next game. 

[Chavez Ravine]

1 hour ago, accinfo said:

The Orioles are 14-9 in September.  That is a .609 winning percentage.  Tired or not they are doing just fine.  

Yeah, our tired is better than their tired. 

[Yossarian]

23 minutes ago, Chavez Ravine said:

Yeah, our tired is better than their tired. 

They (the Rays) have also lost a lot to injury this last month. 

[Yossarian]

I'm thinking the best strategy with the pitching is to stagger 60-day IL trips for the pitching staff throughout the year.  That way, at the end of the year, the staff has only pitched 4 months instead of 6 and should be fresh. 

But yes,  to the original post -- this has been a fun ride this year.   And totally unexpected for me.  This is a bonus year that is leading to playoff baseball.  Nothing is better than that. 

[Uli2001]

The thing about this team is that it always bounces back. It never has a long losing streak. Even after the toughest loss(es) they come back and win the next day.

[Can_of_corn]

1 hour ago, TonySoprano said:

TB and BAL, two heavyweights in the middle of the ring, trading shots.   

 

[Spy Fox]

15 minutes ago, Uli2001 said:

The thing about this team is that it always bounces back. It never has a long losing streak. Even after the toughest loss(es) they come back and win the next day.

The amazing month-to-month consistency and sweepless streak surely has some randomness to thank, but I think it's also attributable to:

• Really positive clubhouse chemistry. Has there been a whiff of drama at all in the past couple years? That can prevent negative energy from snowballing. 
• Related to the above, good leadership and a lack of ego on the team. I think this comes from Hyde's steadiness and positivity, and perhaps Elias prioritizing character to some extent in his acquisitions. Plus, the fact that a lot of this team is young and hungry and came up together for the past several years. 
• An incredibly balanced roster on both offense and defense. As illustrated in some recent threads about the similar OPS of our best seven or so hitters, positive WAA at all nine positions, etc.. this team gets contribution from all 26 roster spots week in and week out and that makes the combined results more slump-proof because there is usually someone picking up the slack for others who are struggling. Compare to the Yankees where if Judge and Cole have a bad two weeks the team is more likely than not to struggle. 

[Frobby]

This is the third time this year that the O’s got down 0-2 in a four game series and it felt like the sky was falling.  All three times they came back to split the series.  

July 3-6: after losing 4 of their previous 5, the O’s visited the Yankees in a 4-game set and lost the first two, 6-3 and 8-4.   At that point, they’d lost a season worst 6 of 7 games and had fallen 6 games behind the Rays.  With their backs to the wall, the Orioles won the next two 6-3 and 14-1, and ended up reeling off 8 straight wins, trimming Tampa’s lead to one game in the process.  In game three, they were losing 2-0 after 5 but rallied to win behind an excellent performance by Dean Kremer, who went 7 innings and allowed only 2 runs, one earned.    The finale was a blowout that left the O’s feeling like they’d won the series even though it was a 2-2 split.  

Sept. 14-17: After a successful 9 game road trip, the O’s came home and dropped the final two games of a three game series to St. Louis, scoring only two runs combined in those two games.   The Rays came into town, trailing by two games, and promptly got into a virtual tie in the standings by beating the O’s 4-3 and 7-1.  At that point, the O’s had tied their prior high losing streak with 4 straight losses, and had scored only 6 runs in 4 games.  But the next night, Grayson Rodriguez pitched 8 brilliant innings, the bats woke up, and the O’s blanked the Rays 8-0, guaranteeing that the O’s had won the season series and this earned the tiebreaker for the AL East title.   The next day, the O’s came back from deficits of 1-0, 3-1 and 4-3, to win 5-4 in extra innings, getting down to their last strike three different times.   The Rays left Baltimore no closer in the standings than when they arrived, and with the O’s having earned the tiebreaker, in effect adding a game to their lead.

September 20-23:  After losing a heartbreaker in Houston when they blew a 1-0 8th inning lead and lost in the 9th, the O’s rolled into Cleveland for the last four games of a stretch of 17 consecutive games.  They lost game 1 5-2 on a night where the Guardians fouled off 37 Grayson Rodriguez pitches and chased him after 5 innings, then lost the second game 9-8 in heartbreaking fashion when a rally in the top of the 9th to come from behind and put the O’s in the lead 8-7 was quickly reversed, in the bottom of the 9th by a walk-off, two run double off Yennier Cano.  At that point, the O’s had lost 3 in a row for only the third time all year, had suffered two walk-off losses in three days, and the bullpen was absolutely running on fumes.   Tampa had trimmed the O’s lead down to 1.5 games. Enter John Mesns, who allowed only one hit, a solo homer, in 7.1 innings   Still, when he departed the O’s were clinging to a 2-1 lead and needed another five outs.   Manager Brandon Hyde first went to Yennier Cano, who had looked horrible in blowing the lead and losing the game the previous night, and Cano responded by getting a routine fly out and a strikeout.  Then in the 9th Hyde went to Cionel Pérez, who had taken the loss in the series opener by yielding a HBP, a walk and a single without retaining a batter, to face the top of the order.  Pérez redeemed himself by retiring the side in order and the O’s held on for the win.   Then today, Gibson allowed only 1 run in 7 innings, and Coulombe and Hall got the final six outs in a far more relaxing 5-1 win.

All three times, there was a lot of negative karma beyond just the loss of the first two games of the series.  And all three times, a starting pitcher stepped up by throwing 7+ innings in game 3.   In each case, when the series ended it felt like a series win even though it wasn’t.

if any team ever earned a day off, it’s this one.