Polarizing seems like a fair way to describe the first 40% of the Orioles’ season.

Losing so much will do that. All the calls for recriminations and patience, the judgments and defenses of the organization’s practices and philosophies, and the dissatisfaction over what we were watching were justified.

The rest of the way is going to be polarizing, too, because what isn’t?

A little aside about writing: Sometimes I think of things I meant to write after a column is published, which is a result of my own shoddy practices, and other times I’ll have a thought a day later that I wish had occurred to me sooner. This one goes in the second bucket, and it would have fit nicely into last Friday’s column. But here we are.

There were all the good feelings about the Orioles as they began their series against the Athletics, winners of six straight and nine of 11. Then, when they lost Friday, they fell back to 12 games under .500 at 25-37 — such a large and daunting number, even with 100 games to play.

Then they won in uncharacteristic but encouraging fashion Saturday to make it seven wins in eight, 10 wins in 13 — all demonstrations of how much better they’ve been of late — only for Sunday’s loss to drag them back to a dozen games under .500.

And that’s how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. Let’s say they have a .500 homestand. That would put them at 13-7 in their last 20 games as the Angels leave town Sunday. All that would be on pace to get them into the range of wins (85-plus) they’d need to think about a playoff spot.

But there would also be three losses in there, and they’d still be a dozen games under .500, and that would still be a large and daunting number that will go a long way toward stifling whatever hope the wins can conjure.

Now, there will be other things occurring this week beyond the wins and losses that are going to boost sentiment, if not the team itself. The return of Jordan Westburg and Cedric Mullins is going to be massive, just as Colton Cowser’s was.

When Tyler O’Neill and Gary Sánchez return, the Orioles will be as close to whole as they’re going to be for a while. We’re talking about a team that was meant to hit and largely hasn’t, and it’ll get a chance to show that’s going to change in the next couple of weeks as everything it does comes under scrutiny by a front office looking for signals as to how to proceed at the trade deadline.

They have far more nuanced and involved ways of calculating things than we do, and who knows, maybe their projections are so extreme in one direction that they already know what the course should be. But they’ll at least feel the same way the rest of us do. The green arrow going up grows bolder with every victory. Every loss feels like it’s resetting that progress, even if it’s just one game.

I like the idea of trying to get to .500 by the July 31 trade deadline, but even then, last year’s examples of teams around that mark at that time didn’t have playoff odds, per FanGraphs, higher than 15%. (The Tigers, who were an absolute wagon by season’s end and remain one now, were 52-57 on July 31 and had a 1% chance at making the playoffs.) It would be fascinating to know what the internal targets are, too.

The end of the season — 98 games away and counting — feels too far away to make an accounting of this year. Judging from the most recent game will be a tortured existence, and the swings back and forth will be too much.

There are those poles again. I suppose the only true moment of clarity this season can provide in the interim is another massive losing streak, the kind that would spiritually and mathematically ruin this season once and for all. If the alternative is living between the two extremes of encouragement and pessimism, it could always be worse.

Ballpark chatter

“This is better than anything I thought could happen.”

– Ryan O’Hearn

Andy wrote a nice story on O’Hearn that makes an important point. We shouldn’t take for granted that O’Hearn has been an awesome hitter for the last two-plus years and came from basically the abyss to do so.

He has an .802 OPS and 38 home runs in an Orioles uniform and probably doesn’t get as much credit for being a complete hitter rather than just a big strong slugger.

By the numbers

.798

Jackson Holliday nadired at a .570 OPS on April 13 and has a .798 OPS with seven home runs since. Given how last year went, it seems like expectations are tempered for Holliday. They shouldn’t be. This is what he’s doing at age 21, and it stands to reason he’s only going to get better.

The talent pipeline

Samuel Basallo is on another planet right now in terms of his production at Triple-A Norfolk. He hit three home runs in four games to give him 13 in 156 plate appearances this season, which, when added to his three last season, gives him 16 at Triple-A before his 21st birthday.

Not many 20-year-olds get to Triple-A to begin with, and those good enough to slug that much aren’t often there for long. His 55.6% hard-hit rate and average exit velocity of 93.4 mph are impressive, as is the fact that his expected slugging percentage (.601) is better than his actual one (.579), if that’s possible. He’s up to something special in Norfolk.

For further reading

🔁 Zach Eflin’s transformation: This was a fascinating look from Andy at that poor two-start blip from Zach Eflin and what he did to get back to his best. It’s wild to think he has a 3.45 ERA in an Orioles uniform even with that. He’s made 17 starts with Baltimore and allowed 39 earned runs. Twelve came in those two starts alone. Without them, that’s a 2.44 ERA here.

🩼 Ryan Mountcastle’s injury: This is a bummer. It seemed like he was getting into a bit of a groove the week before he pulled his hamstring with three doubles and seven hits in his last three games. Some might say it was related to us talking through his approach. Some might. We’ll see what happens when he comes back.