What a winning season means at this stage of the Orioles' turnaround
The season their rebuild ended also being a winning one puts the Orioles in place to make an active choice to improve as opposed to a passive one.
The whole point of losing 100+ games in the deliberate manner the Orioles did for the last few seasons is that there’s not a lot of value in being in the middle of the pack, so teams that aren’t going to compete for championships might as well be really bad as opposed to just average.
Yet this season of Orioles baseball has, at least by virtue of its outcome, tested that theory. Yes, this above -.500 club exists because of the top picks earned from those losing seasons like Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson. It also is hard to say the return of meaningful September baseball and a half-million or so more fans to Camden Yards doesn’t have any value. Even if, fantastically, this Orioles season ending on Wednesday without a playoff berth feels in some ways like a disappointment for how close they were and their inability to make that last step, the strides they did make this summer mean something.
Mainly? They mean the hardest part—this actually starting to work—is over, and even the most cynical Orioles fan can get on board with what that entails: that it has to go forward from here.