Getting swept by the Rays shows just how outclassed the Orioles are from top to bottom

In 2023, when the Baltimore Orioles won the AL East, their biggest competition was the Tampa Bay Rays. That season, the Rays jumped out to a massive lead in the division, going 23-6 in the first month of the season, but the Orioles ran them down over the course of the year. At the 2024 trade deadline, when things weren't going the Rays' way, they entered into a rebuild, and with the Orioles still flying high atop the division, it seemed like they weren't going to have to worry about the Rays and their "devil magic" during their contention window. Just a year and a half later, the Rays are back atop the division, and the Orioles' contention window looks like it might be closing before they even won a single playoff game.

Watching the Rays, it feels like they are playing a different sport. Their lineup features a variety of "types of hitters"; in two of the series games, they had Chandler Simpson lead off and had Junior Caminero batting second. There may not be two more different hitters in all of baseball. They've got contact hitters, power hitters, guys who take walks, and platoon guys that can pop in and out of the lineup with ease.

Kyle Bradish summed up what it's like to face this lineup after his start on Tuesday, while speaking with The Banner's Andy Kostka:

The only thing worth adding that Bradish didn't mention was that they're not afraid to let it rip with the ABS challenge system. In the series finale, the Rays overturned four missed calls, creating a walk and reversing multiple strikeouts. The Orioles have not won four challenges in a game all season.

The Rays are undeniably a better baseball team than the Orioles despite their lack of star power

It's not by any means an overpowering offense. Once you get past the Caminero, Aranda, and Diaz part of the lineup, there's not a name on the roster that you'd be afraid to pitch to, but it's a relentless lineup. They won't get themselves out; their worst hitters are going to put the ball in play and make you get them out, and if you stumble or make any sort of mistake, they're all over you.

In general, the Orioles' offense doesn't have much in common with the Rays. They get themselves out all the time. They're tied with Colorado for the highest K% in the league. Unlike the Rays with their varied approaches, the Orioles all seem to be trying to hit the same pitch all game, and nobody on the team can lay off an offspeed pitch below the zone.

Taylor Ward deserves credit for at least having a plan (not swinging), and Pete Alonso and Samuel Basallo have the bat skills to go after a bad pitch and make something happen with it, but by and large, the Orioles lineup looks very easy to pitch to. They don't make contact, they don't want to hit the ball the other way, and if you accidentally leave a ball over the plate, they'll probably take it because they were looking fastball.

This is more than just the Rays' players being better than the Orioles'. That's probably not even true. This is an organizational problem. The biggest difference between the two teams is that, as far as play style and knowing what wins in the league , the Rays are ahead and the Orioles are behind.

A lot of people think that analytics is all about walks and bat speed and complicated charts that explain why a certain pitcher is good. That is part of it, but the end goal of all the numbers is to find edges that can be exploited to win more games. It's about identifying undervalued skills.

The first teams to discover bat speed and launch angle as metrics with a positive relationship to barrels and offense in general had the advantage for a few years before other teams caught on and were able to stack their teams with undervalued, hard-swinging players, giving them an edge. Now that's old hat, and what the smart teams are pivoting to is contact and defense.

It makes sense, if the opposing team is full of guys who are in the lineup because of their swing and not because they are well-rounded, then if you put the ball in play, those butchers are going to turn even poorly hit balls into hits and runs for you. If your defense can run down balls barrelled into the gap, you eliminate the advantage that the other team has worked so hard to create.

That's what happened time and again in this series: the Orioles had many very hard hit balls that Rays defenders ran under, and the Rays poked a bunch of balls down the foul line for "softly hit" doubles and scored a ton of runs on plays where the Orioles defenders got their gloves on what should have been the third out and then butchered it.

The Orioles built this team starting in 2018 with the idea of what a good team looked like at the time, and by the time the team came to fruition, the game had changed, and they have failed to adapt to the reality of Major League Baseball.

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