This one position group is singlehandedly tanking the Orioles team defense

During the offseason and throughout spring training, the Baltimore Orioles placed a lot of emphasis on "fundamentals" in camp. Despite this focus, the Orioles have been a poor defensive team. Pick your favorite defensive statistic, OAA, DRS, FRV; they've all got the Orioles in the bottom five range. Look at the list of pitchers most impacted by poor defense, and you'll find almost the entire Orioles rotation.

So the Orioles pitchers should have a right to be a tad disgruntled by the way the defense behind them has performed. However, the pitchers themselves have been as guilty as any member of the Orioles defense when it comes to defensive gaffes leading to runs.

The Orioles pitchers' fielding errors this year have very been costly

Errors are a stat that gets ignored a lot because it's so subjective, and if everyone is honest, it does seem like there is a league mandate for scorers to be as generous as possible when assigning errors to try to get leaguewide offensive stats to look a little less anemic. So when a player is assessed an error, you know they really goofed it. This season, the Orioles have been assessed 12 errors, and five of those twelve have been on pitchers.

Sometimes a player commits an error, and there is no real harm; the pitcher gets the next batter out, and the game goes on. That has not been the case for the Orioles pitchers this season. All five of their errors have resulted in runs, and most of them have been key runs in close games that the Orioles went on to lose.

Keep in mind, this is just for tracking plays ruled errors. Shane Baz had a flub in his loss to the Pirates that was originally ruled an error and later changed to a hit. That runner came around to score, and the Orioles lost that game by one.

There have been many more examples of this throughout the season. Bradish allowed two tricklers to go off his glove in his latest start against the Royals; neither was called an error (to his credit, neither resulted in a run at least)

What has stood out about the Orioles' misplays is that they have been weird. Bradish had his mini tantrum where he dropped the throw back from the catcher with a runner on third and didn't see him break for home until it was too late. That never happens. Trevor Rogers had a play where he was supposed to be covering first, and just ran to the wrong spot. That's not gonna work. In Bassitt's first inning as an Oriole, he got a comebacker with a runner on third, and despite the fact that he throws to home plate for a living, he spiked the ball wide left and let the runner score. Weird!

So what's to be done about these poorly fielding pitchers? Spring training has come and gone, and it would be unusual for today's game to have pitchers doing PFPs on their off days. Imagine the controversy if the Orioles had to put Rogers on the IL from a twisted ankle because they were drilling their pitchers on ground balls on an off-day.

Benching your starting pitchers because of poor defense would be unheard of.

At this point, the only thing the Orioles can really do to help their pitchers field better is improve the overall defense. When everyone on the team is playing sloppy defense, and there is no accountability for it, that bleeds over into the pitching staff's attitude toward fielding. If good defense doesn't matter to our everyday players, why should the pitchers care about it? Inversely, if defense becomes a point of pride for the team, the pitchers will adopt that attitude as well. If your infielders are buttoned up on defense, then when a ball gets bounced back to the pitcher, he wants to live up to that as well.

There is no way to completely eliminate fielding mistakes from pitchers. Those plays can be chaotic, and it's not fair to expect every pitcher to be Zack Greinke out there, but the silly mistakes that are costing the team runs and games can be managed and improved upon if the whole team is willing to commit to better defense.

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