Dillon Atkinson: Orioles offense being asked to perform a difficult task

After dropping the series opener to the Indians on Monday night by the score of 12-0, the Orioles came back to even up the series at one game apiece by defeating the Tribe 6-5 Tuesday evening. Although they counted differently in the win-loss column, there's one thing that's common between not only those two scores, but the scores of the past 17 games.

In each of the last 17 games, and 21 of the last 24, the Orioles have allowed their opponents to score five or more runs. The 17-game stretch is the second-longest such streak in the majors in the past 100 years. The longest streak is 20 games, set by the 1924 Phillies.

Now, there's no secret that the Orioles have been struggling since mid-May, and the offense deserves a decent amount of the blame. In the last 30 days, the Birds are slashing .250/.299/.438 as a team and are ranked the fifth-worst offense in the majors, per FanGraphs.com's wRC+ measurement. There's no other way around it; they just haven't been good. And when they have been performing well, they haven't done it on a consistent basis. The hot bats of Trey Mancini and Jonathan Schoop have kept the offensive production afloat, while Manny Machado and Adam Jones, among multiple others, have been struggling. However, it is noteworthy that on Tuesday night Machado put on a hitting clinic and Jones drove in the game-winning run. The offense deserves some blame for the club's recent struggles, but not as much blame as I would've thought that I would give them.

Due to the 17-game streak that I mentioned earlier, a lot of fans will push the offensive woes to the side and not even acknowledge them. I took some space above to mention the struggles on offense, but I'm going to push that to the side as well. When your offense is asked to score six or more runs a game over the last 17 contests, you can't expect to win many games. Of the 17 consecutive games with five or more runs allowed, the Orioles have allowed six or more runs in 12 of them, and 10 or more runs in five games. In this span, the O's are being outscored 134-80, a run differential of -54 runs and an approximate average game score of 8-5.

The Orioles' pitching staff, as a whole, has a 6.47 ERA over the last 30 days, which is the highest of all major league clubs over that span. They also have a rotation ERA of 7.67 over that time, which is also the worst among major league starting rotations. The Birds have had six pitchers start games in this timespan, and only one of them has an ERA below 6.00:

* Dylan Bundy: 4.98 ERA over six starts
* Kevin Gausman: 6.51 ERA over five starts
* Ubaldo Jiménez: 6.55 ERA over two starts
* Wade Miley: 7.94 ERA over five starts
* Alec Asher: 9.87 ERA over four starts
* Chris Tillman: 11.47 ERA over six starts

With the Orioles' starting rotation, sadly including Bundy, the club is forced to come back from behind way too often as of late. The O's offense has been very bad over the last 30 days, but it's tough to point a finger at the bats and blame them when they're being forced to score six or more runs every game for 17 straight games, and 21 of the last 24. Even if the Orioles had the best-ranked offense in the league, to ask them to save the pitching staff, which is giving up over five runs every night, is an unfair request from the club. The Birds need to get their offense going if they want to get back on track and make a postseason run, but that won't matter if the pitching staff doesn't step up and put an end to this terrible streak. It's unjust to ask any offense to dig these pitching performances out.

Dillon Atkinson blogs about the Orioles for Orioles Uncensored. Follow him on Twitter: @DAtkinsonOU. His thoughts on the O's appear here as part of MASNsports.com's continuing commitment to welcome guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.