Orioles' historic loss shows why starting pitching has to be the focus of their trade deadline

The Baltimore Orioles suffered their worst loss of the season yesterday. On offense, they were completely dominated, being held scoreless and only managing three total hits, and on the other side of the ball they allowed the Tigers to score in every single inning of the game. For the first couple months of the season, blowout losses were fairly common. There were plenty of games where the Orioles came to the plate for the first time already down multiple runs. Over the last few weeks, however, the Orioles' rotation had looked much improved. Since the end of June, win or lose, the Orioles have mostly played in close games where their starting pitcher at least gave them a chance.

This run of success from a previously underwhelming rotation allowed for some pretty creative and impressive numbers to be thrown around. Suddenly, there was mention that the Orioles rotation had the second-best ERA in baseball since some random date in June, as if that was when the season started. This month of pretty good pitching from the Orioles rotation made it possible to raise the question: do the Orioles really need to upgrade their rotation? This latest loss made the answer quite obvious: yes.

The Orioles big weakness has always been the rotation

The Orioles have been sitting roughly 2.5 games out of a playoff spot for almost two months now. If they have any ambition to close that gap and be a real part of the playoff picture, then they are going to need to string together extended stretches of quality baseball. David Rubenstein maybe got a little over his skis saying that he thought the Orioles could win seven out of ten games for the rest of the season, as that would be basically unheard of, but to make up ground, they are going to have to have multiple stretches where they go 7-3 or 8-2 over a ten-game span. That is hard to do without an excellent pitching staff.

The Orioles rotation is better than they showed for the first two months of the season, but they are still a far cry from excellent. Even if they had a nice five-week stretch, nobody would look at this Orioles rotation and say that's one of the best rotations in the league or even in the American League or even in the American League East. Not only do they not have one of the better rotations in the AL East, but there is a strong argument to be made that they have the worst rotation in the AL East.

It's hard to envision the Orioles making up ground on so many teams that, on a day-to-day basis, are getting better performances from their rotation. The Orioles' only hope of climbing the standings is to make a change and improve their rotation, specifically the Dean Kremer part of it.

You take Kremer out of the rotation and replace him with someone like Reid Detmers or Clay Holmes or whoever they could get at the deadline, and the chances of the Orioles going on a run to the playoffs would increase dramatically.

This isn't to say the starting pitcher is the Orioles' only need. They also need bullpen help and could really use a versatile defender. You might be tempted to think that a sub-.500 team that needs to add this many pieces at the deadline might be better off selling, and usually that would be correct, but with the way the AL has turned out this year, all signs point to the Orioles going for it.

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