A deep dive into the O's offensive approach and why they should stay the course

Here is the thing about baseball: It can indeed break your heart. And in a sport that takes six months to play 162 games and can seem never-ending, the actual playoff ending can take about 24 to 48 hours.

All those games, all those ups and downs, all those emotions, then it's over in a blink.

And a whimper for the Orioles scoring just one run.

Mike Elias indicated Thursday he doesn’t want to make any knee-jerk reactions to the season and that is prudent.

The fanbase, on the other hand, or segments of such, are providing us an overwhelming amount of knee-jerk reactions. Someone must pay for this!

Luckily the management, I will guess, is not so inclined.

This applies to the offense I believe.

For four months - after a strong 2023 season where the Orioles scored over 800 runs for the eighth time in team history – the O’s offense was among the best in the game.

For the last two months it was inconsistent and mediocre.

I hear they should “change their approach.” I say they should not, but rather just tweak, improve and provide alterations where needed. Get some individual hitters going again and we all know the suspects here.

Let’s look at a few facts.

Through July 31, the Orioles were 65-44 (.596) with the third-best record in the majors. In those 109 games, or 67 percent of the season, they scored 5.07 runs per game (third in MLB) and posted an OPS of .774 (first in MLB).

From Aug. 1 on they were 26-27 (.491), tied for 16^th in MLB win percentage. In that time frame, they scored 4.40 runs per game (13^th) with a .702 OPS (16^th).

They were about an average offense as the MLB runs per game average this year was 4.39. So they were not even bad starting Aug. 1, it just looked that way compared to the first 109 games.

By the way, the O's need to walk more right? Maybe so, walks are good. But through July 31 when they were scoring big, they ranked 19th in MLB in walks. From Aug. 1 on they ranked eighth. Give me the OPS and runs per game over the walks. Run production is the bottom line, no matter how you get there. 

Late in the 2023 season, co-hitting coach Ryan Fuller discussed the basics of the O’s approach on offense.

“Our cornerstones from the DR (Dominican Republic) all the way to the big leagues is control the zone,” said Fuller. “Positive swing decisions. If you do that it is going to lead to constant contact and if you have contact on pitches in zone, it’s going to lead to damage. And those extra-base hits and game-changing swings.

“Those three components – we want to control the zone well, we want to put contact on the baseball and not just any kind of contact, but hard contact.”

How about the Orioles just get back to that?

Whether it is individuals who need to work on pitch recognition, scouting reports could be better, whatever the reason, for me that would fall under tweaking the approach, not scrapping it and starting over.

I will guess the team brass will come to similar conclusions, but who knows for sure. Could there be coaching changes? There could be. The O’s changed pitching coaches after a 101-win season. So everything is on the table.

By the way, the falloff of the O’s offense coincides with the day Jordan Westburg got hit on the hand. It was July 31. This is not about one player but he made a difference.

Look at the numbers through July 31 and then add this to it: In the regular season’s final seven games, after Westburg had returned, the team scored 5.7 runs per game with an OPS of .799.

And then nothing in the playoffs. But to react harshly to two games over the sample of 162 we also have, is, for me, a bad idea.

No matter how bad it hurts.