MINNEAPOLIS — By the end of this month, we’ll know much more about who these Orioles really are.

The disastrous start for Baltimore has been explained away by some believers as the result of a difficult strength of schedule over the first month and change of the season. There’s some credence there. The combined winning percentage of the nine teams the Orioles have faced thus far, entering Monday, was .532.

May, by contrast, offers the Orioles a softer path. None of the seven teams on the schedule for the rest of this month, beginning Tuesday against the Minnesota Twins, has an above-.500 record. They combine to hold a .432 winning percentage.

But those sub-.500 clubs can look at the Orioles and see an opportunity, too, because Baltimore is off to as poor of a start as any of them. So the Orioles will either sink or swim this month. If April is anything to go by, sinking seems the stronger possibility.

If it can be believed, Baltimore’s record is actually better than their on-field performance suggests it should be.

What?

Yes. It flatters them.

By Pythagorean win-loss record — a statistic that is based strictly on how many runs a team has scored versus how many it has allowed — the Orioles would be 11-22.

Two games skew these numbers somewhat. The Orioles have lost games 24-2 and 15-3 this year, and both play a large part in the -55 standard run differential. Even without those, though, the run differential would still be -21 (firmly bottom half in the majors).

And in a larger sense, the Orioles are too prone to blowout losses, having experienced nine losses of five or more runs compared to three wins by that amount.

FanGraphs’ BaseRuns metric is even worse for the Orioles.

BaseRuns analyzes four main underlying variables to determine expected run production: base runners, runner advancement, outs and home runs. The combination of those, in essence, helps glean how many runs an offense was expected to score based on how many runners they have on base, and how those runners advance from base to base.

By that formula, the Orioles have won three more games than should be expected based on their underlying performance.

The .298 winning percentage FanGraphs gives the Orioles based on BaseRuns is the second-worst in baseball, ahead of only the Colorado Rockies. That means the Orioles are worse than any of the teams they’ll face this month, even the Chicago White Sox — who, at 10-24, are the second-worst team by traditional win-loss record. (To compare all three side-by-side, FanGraphs has a helpful page.)

Any way you look at it, the Orioles haven’t performed well to begin the year. The biggest issue is the pitching staff, which entered Monday’s off day with a 5.43 ERA — better than only the Miami Marlins. The seven home runs allowed in Sunday’s loss to Kansas City drove this value higher, but there’s no denying it: The 1.60 homers allowed per nine innings are the most of any pitching staff.

There’s a silver lining, however. It starts Tuesday at Target Field and continues all May, when the competition is weaker. Perhaps the return of right-hander Zach Eflin will stabilize the starting rotation. Infielders Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday are turning a corner.

And there’s this aspect: BaseRuns is descriptive, not predictive.

The Orioles have played like a .298 team to this point, which makes them one of the worst clubs in the major leagues thus far. Will they continue to play like a .298 team going forward?

By the end of this month, we should know the answer to that.