11 October 2023
The Rangers started strong and built a lead the Orioles could not challenge, sweeping the winningest team in the American League out of the playoffs with a 7-1 win in Game 3 of the AL Division Series on Tuesday night.
Here are five things we learned from the game.
The Rangers are a vision of what the Orioles could become
The worry going into this series was that Texas’ relentless bats would set a pace the Orioles could not match. That was exactly what happened over the last two games as the Rangers put 33 men on base and scored 18 runs.
Their lineup guarantees a long night full of terrors, from leadoff hitter Marcus Semien’s 73 extra-base hits to Corey Seager’s .623 slugging percentage to Adolis García’s 39 home runs to rookie Evan Carter’s .413 on-base percentage. Manager Bruce Bochy has led three teams to World Series championships and recently said he’s never worked with a better batch of hitters.
Then you look at the Orioles. Gunnar Henderson might put up numbers like those someday. So might Adley Rutschman and several prospects expected to arrive from the farm over the next few years. Anthony Santander, Austin Hays and Cedric Mullins are fine players in their primes, but none is a Most Valuable Player candidate.
The Orioles were outgunned.
The 11-game difference between the Orioles’ and Rangers’ regular-season records probably misled some fans to expect a mismatch in the other direction. But the Rangers hit better — first in the American League in runs, home runs, walks, on-base percentage and slugging percentage — than the Orioles did anything. Their lineup turned out to be the controlling element in the series.
That does not mean it will always be this way for the Orioles. The Rangers spent $500 million on Semien and Seager because they’re finished products. The Orioles are betting their guys — Henderson, Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo, Heston Kjerstad — will be next. They have five position players ranked among Baseball America’s top 50 prospects.
That’s cold comfort for this year’s team and for the fans who grew to love it, but the Orioles stand a good chance of becoming the bullies with the heaviest lumber in some not-so-distant October.
Rutschman stood silently, his eyes locked on the Rangers whooping it up after the final out. “You gotta tell yourself you’re going to be there next year,” he explained later.
Exactly.
Brandon Hyde didn’t have a better choice than Dean Kremer to start Game 3, and the Orioles need to change that
The Rangers eat mistakes like so much Texas barbecue. You can’t miss within the strike zone, and you can’t let them off the hook if you’re up in the count.
Kremer did both in an outing he’d like to forget.
The Rangers picked up where they left off in Game 2, smacking three hits off Kremer in the first inning. Seager, probably the best hitter in the American League this year, jumped all over a changeup that drifted too far inside, golfing it into the right field seats to put Texas up 1-0 in the bottom of the first.
In the second, Kremer started Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe with a pair of fastball strikes only to let the at-bat mushroom into a 15-pitch nightmare that guaranteed he would be out of the game earlier than hoped. He had a chance to escape the inning when he started Semien with a pair of cutters for strikes, but again, he couldn’t find an out pitch, and Semien doubled on a 2-2 cutter.
That led to disaster in the form of a two-run double from Mitch Garver on another imprecise changeup and a 418-foot three-run home run from García on a high fastball Kremer left in the zone.
“Made a couple mistakes, but even the balls that were just off were still getting hit and landing,” he said afterward. “That’s a hot team right now.”
Plenty of fans disagreed with manager Brandon Hyde’s choice of Kremer over Kyle Gibson, who had more postseason experience and pitched well against the Rangers in April. But it’s difficult to say one man clearly pitched better than the other in 2023. Kremer had the lower ERA and certainly outpitched Gibson in July and August. Gibson allowed fewer home runs and finished the regular season with two good starts. Their strikeout-to-walk ratios were identical. Neither felt like a sure thing with the season on the line.
Would John Means, whose command appeared all the way back in his third and fourth starts after returning from Tommy John elbow reconstruction, have been better than either? We’ll never know, because elbow soreness kept him off the ALDS roster.
The Orioles hoped Jack Flaherty would be up for a spot like this when they traded for him at the deadline. He was not.
Their offseason mission is now clear, if it was not already. They will not reach their full potential over the next five years if they don’t add another good starter or two to complement their embarrassment of position player riches. They helped Kyle Bradish develop from a mid-tier prospect to a potential All-Star, but they cannot count on that happening again. It’s time to go shopping in free agency or trade one of their blocked hitting prospects.
General manager Mike Elias watched his then-boss, Jeff Luhnow, add Charlie Morton and Justin Verlander to help the Houston Astros over the hump in 2017, so he knows the formula.
Orioles hitters needed a fast start and instead spent the evening working from behind
They would have struggled to keep pace with the Rangers’ six-run explosion under the best circumstances, but the Orioles did not give themselves a chance against Texas starter Nathan Eovaldi.
In the first inning, Rutschman got behind 0-2 and chased a splitter for a strikeout. Ryan Mountcastle got behind 0-2 and struck out on a 95 mph four-seam fastball.
In the second, Ryan O’Hearn got behind 0-2 and bounced out weakly. Mullins got behind 0-2 and yes, bounced out weakly.
In the third, four straight Orioles started at-bats with 0-2 counts. They did not score.
After their Game 1 loss, Hyde said they hadn’t forced Texas to deal with enough traffic. Facing elimination, they fell right back into the same pattern.
“Offensively, we weren’t at our best the last two, three weeks of the season,” Hyde said. “That carried into the postseason where we had guys scuffling.”
Give Eovaldi credit. He attacked the strike zone with fastballs and mixed in enough splitters to keep the Orioles uncomfortable. Were they too eager or simply unable to punish Eovaldi when he gave them pitches to hit? The answer varied from hitter to hitter, but the results were numbingly similar.
Want a little silver lining from this series? Look at DL Hall.
Scouts heralded Hall’s athletic ability and upside from the time the Orioles drafted him in the first round out of a Georgia high school in 2017, and he was still a top-100 prospect headed into this season despite nagging injuries that had hampered his development.
After a rough initiation to the major leagues last year and a lone three-inning appearance in April, Hall needed to find a foothold. He began to do it with a string of seven scoreless appearances to end the regular season, but this Texas series could be his bridge to a prominent place in the Orioles’ 2024 bullpen.
We’ve established how well the Rangers hit. In Game 1, Hall faced them down over 1 2/3 innings, striking out three and allowing no hits to keep the Orioles within striking distance. He did it again Tuesday, allowing just one hit and striking out three over 1 2/3 scoreless innings. He was his team’s most effective pitcher in the series.
A reliever, left-handed no less, who can overpower hitters for more than an inning at a time is a cherished asset for a contender.
It’s lunacy to call this season anything less than a massive success
This ending will ache.
That’s how it is when joy builds and builds for six months only to vanish in four days. But a playoff sweep is not the final word on a season that reset Baltimore’s relationship with and expectations for its ballclub.
For many people 40 and younger, this season has been the pinnacle of Orioles fandom. Yes, the 1997 and 2014 teams advanced further in the playoffs, but did either carry the feeling of limitless possibility that exists around the 2023 Orioles?
The safest bet going into this year was that they would either plateau after last season’s 31-game leap or perhaps take a slight step backward. Instead, they won 101 games, the most by any Orioles club since 1979, and beat Las Vegas’ projection by more than 20 games for the second straight year.
As one member of the data-driven front office said during an informal chat, that just doesn’t happen. Vegas oddsmakers aren’t dummies.
“They defied all the odds,” Hyde said proudly when it was over.
If the best players on this team follow normal baseball aging curves, they’re either entering their primes or have not yet sniffed them. The No. 1 prospect in baseball, Holliday, could join the fun next year, with another handful of the best hitters in the minor leagues either just ahead of or just behind him. As Elias said the night the Orioles clinched the AL East, this thing is built to last.
There’s a cognitive dissonance between regular season and postseason baseball. Clubs built to succeed over the 162-game slog lose their mojo for a week and suddenly, it’s over. We’ve seen it happen to some of the best teams in recent history — the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers of 2022, the 107-win San Francisco Giants of 2021, the 116-win Seattle Mariners of 2001.
The Orioles won 11 more games than the Rangers in the regular season, but their run differential was 36 runs worse. They hit exceptionally in high-leverage situations, and their bullpen was outstanding for much of the year, but they did not get on base, hit home runs or prevent runs at an exceptional rate. There’s no reason to view this as a massive upset.
The Orioles have the young talent to become a dominant team. If they make the playoffs three or four more times over the remainder of this decade, their October breakout will come.
That it did not happen this year tells us little about where the bigger story is going.
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