Andy MacPhail, the Orioles’ president of baseball operations, divided the franchise’s 11th straight losing season into sections to gauge the team’s overall progress in its first last-place finish in 20 years.
MacPhail was pleased the pitching staff had a 4.23 earned-run average the first month of the season, but disappointed it ballooned to 6.05 after the All-Star break.
He was frustrated the Orioles hit just .255 with 28 home runs through April, but encouraged they hit .270 with 144 home runs the final 133 games.
And as excited as he was when the team entered the All-Star break just two games under .500, he was just as demoralized it ended a 93-loss season by dropping 28 of 34 games.
“This was really a tale of two seasons,” he said. “The first three quarters of the season, I think we really excelled and played beyond what anybody would have anticipated, myself included,” MacPhail said. “The last quarter of the season has been a far different story. We’ve really struggled. The pitching has pretty much disintegrated.”
For the Orioles, here’s the season’s bottom line: The Orioles put together stretches of solid hitting and pitching, but never at the same time.
The result: a 68-93 record, which left the team needing to answer nearly as many questions as it had on Opening Day.
“I don’t know how you work on hitting good and pitching good at the same time,” designated hitter Aubrey Huff said. “It’s just one of those things.”
The Orioles’ pitching was strong at the beginning of the season, when most of their starting rotation was healthy. After an Opening Day loss, the Orioles won a season-high six straight and remained within two games of .500 until Aug. 18, when the team began a disastrous stretch in which it lost 15 of 17 games.
“It is frustrating, because I thought we were very good early,” pitching coach Rick Kranitz said. “I thought our pitching was extremely good early, and it started to tail off, and when injuries started to come, guys didn’t step up. That’s what you have to do.”
The team simply could not compensate when Jamie Walker, Adam Loewen, Matt Albers, Jeremy Guthrie and All-Star George Sherrill were sidelined with injuries for portions of the season. It forced Manager Dave Trembley to insert Alfredo Simon, Brian Bass, Lance Cormier into the starting lineup.
Meantime, the offense scored 782 runs in 161 games — an average of 4.86 runs a night. But during the team’s five, five-game losing streaks in the middle of the season, the pitching couldn’t complement the hitting.
And when the team had an eight-game and 10-game losing streak during the season’s final three weeks, the offense averaged just 3.2 runs per game. It wasn’t nearly enough to support a floundering pitching staff in which its starter rarely lasted past the sixth inning.
“You look at it two ways,” right fielder Nick Markakis said. “We had a great first half. We got hot in the middle of the season with our bats and we had some injuries, but we battled through it. It’s been a rough last three months, but that’s the way baseball goes sometimes.”
