Orioles prove they're a "get right" team in series loss to the Padres

The Baltimore Orioles came into their series against the Padres on a two-game winning streak and took the first game of the series to push that streak to three. A three-game winning streak may not sound like much, but it's the longest winning streak the Orioles have had all year. The Orioles are one of just three MLB teams this season to have had at least one four-game winning streak, the other two being the Boston Red Sox and the San Francisco Giants, two of the most well-reported-on dumpster fires in baseball this year. With the Orioles currently sitting at five games under .500, they are going to need to go on a run in order to get back in the playoff picture, but the way this team is constructed makes doing that incredibly difficult, and this most recent series against the Padres showed exactly why.

When the Padres arrived in Baltimore, they had the worst offense in all of baseball by almost any stat you can think of. They had the worst batting average, they got on base the least, and they hit for the least power; their team wRC+ was 85. They had scored fewer runs than any other team in baseball.

Over the next three games, they scored 17 runs on the Baltimore Orioles. The only team to allow the Padres to score more runs against them in a single series this season was the Colorado Rockies back at the very beginning of April. That's the company the Orioles are keeping when it comes to run prevention.

The Orioles made the worst offense in baseball look dominant

Run prevention is the keyword there because, as bad as the Orioles' pitching was at times during this series, the defense behind them often did them no favors. In the very first inning of the series, a Coby Mayo error turned what should have been a 1-2-3 inning in less than 10 pitches into a 20+ pitch inning where the Padres took the lead. That was a real setback for Shane Baz and basically set the tone for the whole series. Gunnar Henderson played his worst defense of the season, Jackson Holliday chimed in with an error, and both of the runs Trevor Rogers gave up would have been avoided with better infield defense.

It's not all on the defense. There was certainly nothing anyone on the field could have done to help Trey Gibson when he went walk ,homer, walk, homer to start the game on Saturday. It's a vicious cycle; the Orioles pitchers don't strike hardly anyone out and give up a lot of hard contact, and the defense behind them isn't good enough to cover for them. Then, when there is a routine play to be made, that's when the worst errors seem to happen

The fact that the Orioles allowed the worst offense in baseball to have their best offensive series since early April is discouraging, but the worst part is that this is not a blip on the radar; this is who this Orioles team is and will continue to be. Their pitching and defense make them a "get right" spot for anyone who sees them on the schedule.

There will be nights where Kyle Bradish goes 7.1 innings with 1 ER, and there will be nights when the offense pops off for 7-8 runs, and the team will look the way it's designed to look. The Orioles have certainly had 1-2 game stretches where they got some good pitching and the offense gelled, and for a moment, they looked like contenders. However, those are outlier performances, and it's really hard to string four outlier performances together.

Unless the Orioles make a significant change, they are not going to be able to crawl out of the hole they've dug themselves.

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