Orioles’ playoff flashback shows exactly where things unraveled

Two Octobers ago, the Baltimore Orioles looked like a franchise just beginning its run — youth, swagger, depth, and a 26-man ALDS group that felt like the opening credits to a long series. Fast-forward, and 14 names from that 2023 ALDS roster are gone.

For a “young core,” that’s a staggering amount of churn. Turnover isn’t automatically a sin; modern contenders swap parts all the time. But for Baltimore, the pace and sequencing of those exits, paired with ill-timed injuries eroded the very thing that carried them to 101 wins: continuity in run prevention, a flexible bullpen, and dependable middle-of-the-order glue.

This is the uncomfortable truth the flashback exposes: the unraveling didn’t come from one bad decision or one cold week at the plate. It came from a thousand cuts that all targeted the same arteries.

One-year bets and short-window rentals asked the rotation to constantly re-introduce itself. Bullpen attrition, whether by trade or by scalpel, kept roles in flux. And moving out reliable everyday pieces in the outfield and first base forced the lineup to relearn its own identity while the pitching staff was trying to hold a lead with new faces. Youth can cover a lot, but it can’t cover everything all at once.

Fourteen missing Orioles tell the real story of a stalled franchise

Start with the rotation choices that defined two summers. Jack Flaherty arrived in 2023 as a deadline bridge and left as a free agent — a reasonable gamble at the time that never grew into something more. He’s since re-centered himself and is pitching meaningful October innings for someone else, which only sharpens the sting.

The story repeats in a different key with Corbin Burnes: a justifiable swing for an ace that bought credibility in 2024, but only for a year. When rentals are the answer and extensions aren’t the follow-up, you end up renting your own stability. Kyle Gibson’s departure was cleaner business, but it still subtracted veteran volume from a rotation that soon needed it.

Then there’s the DL Hall dilemma, the kind of move great teams agonize over. Trading a savvy lefty for a year of Burnes made sense in the narrow frame of 2024, but the bill came due fast. Hall is now pitching leverage frames for a different contender this October, and the Orioles are left balancing a long-term picture without him. That’s not an indictment of the Burnes trade; it’s a reminder that every rental comes with a shadow cost, and sometimes that cost shows up on a national stage in someone else’s uniform.

Layer on the injuries and bullpen shakeups, and the architecture really starts to wobble. Félix Bautista’s Tommy John wiped out the most dominant clean-inning plan in baseball. Kyle Bradish’s own elbow trouble removed a frontline starter just as those rental bets aged out. Around them, the relief cast kept changing, parts designated, traded, or allowed to walk, requiring a new late-game script seemingly every month. It’s hard to be the team that shortens games when you’re constantly auditioning.

Finally, the everyday group lost too many stabilizers at once. Cedric Mullins moving on meant outfield coverage and lineup balance had to be reinvented. Anthony Santander’s exit removed switch-hit thump that protected the kids. Ryan O’Hearn’s length and matchup utility vanished with him. None of these departures is fatal alone; together, they asked Baltimore’s youngest bats to carry more, sooner, and against playoff pitching that doesn’t grant learning curves.

In that light, the ALDS replay isn’t nostalgia, it’s a diagnostic. It shows where the foundation cracked. The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s hard to execute. Lock in innings you can count on, keep at least one more premium arm you’d rather not trade, and resist the temptation to solve three needs with 10 transactions. Do that, and Baltimore’s next October won’t be playing somewhere else, it could back at Camden Yards.