Orioles weren't built in a day, but they might win for years

An exciting young nucleus has surged to the best record in the American League.

Gunnar Henderson

Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, asked about the money needed to spruce up Oriole Park at Camden Yards, recently declared, “I’ve got 99 problems but the Orioles are not one.”

He was understating. Any mayor of Baltimore has 99 problems per hour. And the Orioles are a very big problem, for everyone else in the American League, and for the foreseeable future.

The best story of this resurrection season is not the pitch clock, although that has certainly fulfilled its design. The best story is the way Baltimore and Cincinnati and Miami and, to a lesser extent, Pittsburgh are showing that you don’t have to live in hell forever, and when you do emerge, your fans are waiting.

This is particularly true in the old baseball towns, where the empty seats in the sumptuous new ballparks yawned mockingly at the game’s recent obsolescence. In 2023 that has changed, and it seems very real, and a lost generation has found the stadium again.

The Orioles have the best record in the American League. They won their 70th game on August 8. In 2018, 2019 and 2021 they averaged 51 wins. There was suffering involved, the kind that can snuff young careers before they ignite, but somehow these millennials kept the faith in themselves and each other.

The city is buying it. The Orioles are averaging 22,987 fans, an increase of 7,000 per game over last year, and now you see Orioles fans invading Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field and Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. If the game is truly dying, who knew the ICU could be so much fun?

They are doing this in time-honored Baltimore fashion, from the soil, just like the ground that produced Earl Weaver’s tomato plants beyond the outfield fence in Memorial Stadium. the ones he turned into a competition with groundskeeper Pat Santarone.

In their usual lineup there are seven homegrown players, but that will increase as Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser, their recent callups, get more comfortable, and when Jackson Holliday, the first overall pick in 2022, makes his expected splash. The expectation is that every member of the 2024 lineup will be under 30 years old.

In 2019, as the varsity was going 54-108 and drawing only 1.4 million at home, the Orioles took Oregon State catcher Adley Rutschman first overall, and then shortstop/third baseman Gunnar Henderson in the second round. The Orioles promoted Rutschman in May of 2022 and they have a .587 win percentage since that day. He’s 25, and Henderson, who came from Selma, Ala., is 22. Henderson has 19 home runs and an .808 OPS, second only to Ryan O’Hearn.

There are a lot of interchangeable parts here. Last year Jorge Mateo might have been the best shortstop in baseball, but on Tuesday against Houston he was playing centerfield so Henderson could play short. He went back to the center-field wall, leaped for Yordan Alvarez’s home run try, and came down smiling. In the ninth, Kyle Tucker hit a grand slam off Felix Bautista, the ominous closer, and Houston won, 7-6, just to show Baltimore’s newbie fans the nature of the game. It will take a lot more of those bumps to dispel Baltimore’s new-team smell.

But the Orioles have made this leap thanks to a pitching staff that has finally been freed from the trunk of its car. Because the brain trust decided to expand Oriole Park before the 2022 season, specifically the left-field alley that now is 398 feet from home plate with a fence that was raised from seven feet to 13, it’s actually difficult to leave these Yards.

In 2019 the Orioles gave up 1.90 home runs per nine innings. In 2022, with the wide open spaces, they gave up 1.07, and the figure is 1.12 this year. The Orioles also are giving up 4.04 runs per game instead of 6.06 in 2019.

That’s overall numbers. The home effect has been extraordinary. In 2019, visiting players feasted, with 175 home runs in Baltimore. In 2022 they hit 74, and Tucker’s was the 63rd of this season. You know you’re doing something right when Aaron Judge is calling it a “travesty” and an example of “create-a-park.”

In a way it was like a venerable old golf course that was getting savaged by the bomb-and-gougers on the PGA Tour. Now it’s been stretched and, in a way, narrowed. It gives the Oriole outfielders more room to run and exhibit their speed, and it opens up gaps for their hitters. More to the point, it’s real baseball, the game the Orioles drafted these guys to play.

But there are still times when the Angelos family has to remind you that it still owns the Orioles, and nothing good comes without a price.

On July 23, Kevin Brown, one of the TV play-by-play men, was recounting the Orioles’ past difficulty in beating Tampa Bay on the road. He was illustrating how far the Orioles had come, and was basically just delivering statistics. It didn’t matter. The Orioles suspended him, without announcing it, bringing down the wrath of many fans, some of whom chanted “Free Kevin Brown” on Tuesday, and Brown’s fellow broadcasters. But Brown hasn’t been heard since.

This was irrational on several levels. If broadcasters can’t mention facts, maybe it’s time to bring in the robots, most of which can ask more topical questions than the typical club-employed postgame interviewer.

It also ignored the vibes of the summer in a sweltering town where life is hardly easy. Whenever a ballclub wins for the first time, or wins with a new core like Baltimore is doing, it’s a rush that won’t be duplicated. Bobby Cox’s Braves won 14 division titles in succession, but never seemed happier than in 1991, when they went worst-to-first and beat the Dodgers in doing that. These Orioles fans are squeezing into an outfield section called the Bird Bath, in which they get soaked whenever the club does something good.

The grandfathers of those fans appreciate the methods. The Orioles have always done it the hard way, the brick-by-brick way. They were supposed to be endangered in the mid-70s when free agency came along, and their ownership clearly couldn’t match the Yankees and Angels dollar-for-dollar. But, beginning in 1977, they won 389 games in a four-year period, and in 1983 won the World Series.

The box office didn’t always benefit from that excellence. In 1974 the Orioles had Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Boog Powell, Bobby Grich, and a team that would win 91 games. Their motto was A Million Or More in ‘74, referring to attendance at Memorial Stadium, and they only drew 962,572.

Oriole Park changed all that. It was such a breathtaking sight, such a combo of nostalgia and dazzle, that the Orioles averaged 44,000 per game in the debut season of 1992 and led the league in attendance four consecutive years beginning in ‘95, the year Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s record. In 1997 the Orioles drew 3.7 million, aided by fans from D.C. who didn’t have baseball yet.

Can a baseball club really dispel 99 problems? Not really. But in 2022 some Oriole executives with long memories installed tomato plants by the bullpens. Add 99 or so wins by the 2023 Orioles, and maybe things can grow here.