Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

MLB

Orioles took misstep, but they’re actually getting better

Remember the last game of the 2011 Phillies season? It was bad enough for them that the Cardinals beat them in a do-or-die National League Division Series Game 5 at home. What made it epically terrible was Ryan Howard, in making the final out of the series, tore his left Achilles tendon and was out of action until July 6 of the subsequent season.

In all, Howard has a .244/.307/.445 slash line in 151 games and 609 plate appearances since that fateful night — and he has another $85 million guaranteed to him through 2016. Ay caramba. The Phillies are 152-166 since that night.

That’s about as bad as it gets for a double whammy, getting eliminated and losing a huge piece in one fell swoop, but that came to mind Monday as the Orioles not only suffered a huge loss to the Rays, but also lost their stud third baseman Manny Machado for the duration of the season and possibly into next year with a nasty-looking left knee injury. We’ll learn more Tuesday, when he gets an MRI exam, yet you hope this won’t be an injury that permanently compromises the 21-year-old Machado, who has established himself as one of the game’s most exciting young players.

The Orioles are extremely likely to miss the playoffs — CoolStandings.com puts their chances at less than .1 percent — after making them last year. However, it would be a mistake to mark this down as a year of regression. Instead, 2013 should be marked down as a season of confirmation, in which Buck Showalter, GM Dan Duquette and the Baltimore players showed last season was no fluke.

We wondered extensively about the flukiness of the 2012 Orioles because they vastly outplayed their run differential, putting up a 93-69 mark while scoring 712 runs and allowing 705. They posted an otherworldly 29-9 record in one-run games and went 16-2 in extra innings, sparking the predictable, boring-by-now debate concerning how much was attributable to toughness and how much to luck.

Well, the Orioles’ bullpen ERA jumped to 3.49 from last year’s 3.00, while their starting pitchers’ ERA also crept up to 4.54 in ’13 from 4.42 in ’12. Not surprisingly, last year’s one-run and extra-inning magic has gone poof! and changed into 17-30 and 8-6. It happens.

Yet these Orioles’ overall 715-676 run differential reflects their overall progress. While Machado’s situation is a huge concern, they still have young, talented, under-control players in the fold, such as Most Valuable Player candidate Chris Davis, Adam Jones, Matt Wieters and Chris Tillman. Young pitcher Kevin Gausman, the fourth overall pick in last year’s draft, scuffled in the big leagues, but he’s only 22 and will be given more time. The Orioles’ other young pitching stud, Dylan Bundy, the fourth overall pick of the 2011 draft, underwent Tommy John surgery in June.

So it was a far from perfect year for the Orioles. Yet coming off one of the more statistically eye-catching campaigns in recent baseball history, they showed they weren’t going to slide back into the hole from which they posted 14 consecutive losing seasons. They’re going to hang around, which is of course bad news for the Yankees.

Speaking of the Yankees, here’s my column in Tuesday’s paper. I’m curious to see if they can at least make the other teams work to eliminate them or whether they’ll eliminate themselves. Sunday was quite an emotional day, between the salute to Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte’s final home game, and they learned over the weekend that CC Sabathia is done for the year, too. Do they have anything at all left?

Have a great day.