ARLINGTON, Texas — After the throng of media walked away from his locker, after he choked back his emotions while repeating “I’m proud of our guys,” multiple times, the face of the Orioles stood in the visiting clubhouse at Globe Life Field with both arms outstretched.
Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman wanted a hug.
The 5-year-old in front of him didn’t get it. Not at first.
Christian McCann, the son of Orioles reserve catcher James McCann, thought Rutschman was being playful. So, he punched Rutschman’s right hand. Then he slapped it.
Rutschman said softly, ‘Come on, I need it.”
Christian then leaned into the 25-year-old catcher, and Rutschman momentarily put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and back.
Christian then bounced back to his twin brother and his dad while Rutschman stood there for a moment, wistfully, before turning to his locker. And to what will be a long offseason of what-could-have-been.
“It’s tough to kind of reflect right now, because you’re saying all your goodbyes and what-not,” Rutschman said. “But, you know, we’ll be back.”
The Orioles’ joyous 2023 ride ended unceremoniously minutes before in a 7-1 loss to the fifth-seed Rangers, who have won five consecutive postseason games, including three straight against the AL’s top seed in a best-of-five ALDS.
After 101 wins in the regular season, the franchise’s most since 1979, the Orioles came up completely empty, extending their playoff drought to eight games, which stretches back to the 2014 ALCS.
Tuesday’s season-ender, and the two losses in Baltimore over the weekend, were a massive, massive disappointment for a team that felt it could continue to shock its critics and win a World Series for the first time in 40 years.
“Winning (101) games, that’s a big deal. We still won our division. But we had our sights set on winning the last game of the season. So, yeah, we’re very disappointed,” said Orioles left fielder Austin Hays. “I feel like what we did in the postseason, I feel like we failed. But looking back at the season as a whole, we accomplished a lot as a team this year. We just came up a little bit short on this series. We just came up short on this season.”
This was an incredible year for the Orioles. That shouldn’t be forgotten.
What certainly won’t be forgotten, though, is how 2023 finally unraveled:
It all ended with a painful irony.
The team that wasn’t swept in 2023 – a span of 52 series – and hadn’t been swept in a regular-season series of at least two decisions since May 13-15, 2022 – that’s 91 consecutive series, the fourth longest streak in MLB history – were swept in their first postseason series in nine years.
Playoff baseball is a different breed of baseball, and these young Orioles didn’t hit in Game 1, didn’t pitch well in Game 2 and didn’t do anything Tuesday. They fell behind 6-0 in the second inning and never rallied.
In hindsight, choosing Dean Kremer to start over veteran Kyle Gibson in the do-or-die game wasn’t the right call. Kremer recorded only five outs and was pulled in the second inning after giving up his second home run in two innings, a three-run shot to Adolis García. Gibson entered in the fourth and threw three innings, yielding one run on one hit, a solo homer by Nathaniel Lowe in the sixth in what could be the pending free agent’s final outing as an Oriole.
But it may not have mattered anyway. Because the Orioles couldn’t solve Texas right-hander Nate Eovaldi. He cruised through the Orioles offense, allowing five hits and one run – a Gunnar Henderson RBI single in the fifth – in seven innings. Eovaldi has owned the Orioles for much of his career, but, regardless, the offense picked a bad day to disappear again.
And suddenly this Orioles’ run is over.
“It definitely sucks right now. Been spending every day with these guys for the past eight months, so this is definitely tough,” said Orioles starter Kyle Bradish, who made a point to hug every player that was by their lockers postgame. “But if I take a step back and see what we did this year, it’s definitely something to build off for next year.
The good news here is that this is a young team. It’s now been to a postseason. It knows what it’s like to watch the other team celebrate. And this group has so much talent, so much upside.
The bad news is that future postseasons aren’t guaranteed. These Orioles will start at 0-0 in 2024 and will have to do it all over again to get back here.
One would think the American League East will get better – the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox aren’t the rebuilding types – and the Orioles need to maintain the relative health that they had for most of the year.
This three-game sweep should sound an alarm for management – and particularly ownership – that the Orioles are really, really good, but not quite good enough yet.
They need a few reinforcements, especially someone atop this rotation to take pressure off the solid core of Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, Kremer and a healthy John Means. They still may not do that by spending money in free agency, but they have the minor-league capital to land a legitimate starter if they desire.
A couple tweaks and 2023 could turn out to be the beginning of a succession of playoff teams at Camden Yards.
That’s for the offseason, though. That’s for when there is a clearer head, and the disappointment stings a little less.
For now, the Orioles, like Rutschman, are in search of a comforting hug.
Maybe in a few days or a few weeks, all of the players and staff can sit back and enjoy what this season was.
“Honestly, living in the moment the entire season, just realizing we were turning the corner and what we were doing was really special. Just seeing the city rally around us again, seeing the fans show back up. Everything that comes into winning. Just how fun the clubhouse was,” Hays said. … Just how much fun this season really was is what I’ll take away from it.
“It was a really special year.”
