It’s April, but it sure doesn’t feel like it where these Orioles are concerned.

For a variety of reasons, some fair and some less so, this early-season period where you’d expect the Orioles to still be ironing out roles for players, managing workloads at the start of a six-month grind, and figuring out who they are as a team is not being regarded with much grace.

It doesn’t help that they’ve either been really good and won or played terribly and lost, without much in between. I can’t imagine there’s another team that has vacillated so drastically between looking like world-beaters and looking listless, and for a team whose offseason was described in these parts as reinforcing the floor of their roster, they’d be well-suited to raising the floor on how they play on a nightly basis to give themselves some slack.

Because honestly, that’s what this is about: maintaining some breathing room. I didn’t have to watch this team play for very long to realize that it wasn’t going to be its best self for a while, but since then we’ve seen a handful of examples of a team that feels like it couldn’t be worse.

This front office doesn’t look like one to change course drastically based on less than 7% of the season, and their conviction level in how they put the team together isn’t going to waver based on these small sample sizes.

Baseball isn’t played in a vacuum, though. There are stadiums full of fans and countless avenues for opinions and discourse and constructive commentary and dissent, and no amount of perspective can convince someone who just watched a bad performance from a team they’re invested in that it was anything but that.

The Orioles have scored just 10 runs across their six losses, with a .507 OPS as a team, and allowed 34 runs in those games. Maybe the April 3 8-4 loss to Boston could be described as a game when they scored enough to win, but otherwise, that’s not an argument they can make.

When they win, though, the Orioles have 42 runs and a collective .974 OPS while allowing 14 runs in those five victories. The averages through 11 games feel fine. They’re scoring 4.7 runs per game and have a team ERA of 4.36. They’re probably better than that on both sides of the ball, but the bad games have dragged those down a bit.

So, I posit — and this might sound wild — that they stop playing so badly when they’re not at their best. Because if they want to show people that this isn’t the same team that disappointed them last year, they need to do it. It’s not their fault that such perceptions still exist, but nothing really happened in the winter to change that.

This is where we get into the fair and unfair of it all. Owner and control person David Rubenstein, in describing the risk/reward of massive free agent contracts to my pal Andy Kostka, used the following language to describe why a team would make what they consider a poor financial deal: “We’ll make somebody happy on the first day we announce it.”

Let me be clear. I totally get it and am in support of that conceptually. I think I support it in practice, too. What that means, though, is that many people were not made happy at any point between the Orioles’ letdown in October and the resumption of play two weeks ago. Not all those concerned about the Orioles are simply malcontents, though they exist. The clear majority want to believe in this team and believe they are good, and it’s been impossible to hold that belief for longer than a day so far.

That we’re only 11 games into the season doesn’t feel relevant in the way that it should. There’s not much that I can do to change that, but I’m just going to keep reminding myself of that.

It’s early. Being early doesn’t excuse bad, correctable play. It doesn’t automatically mean everything is going to get better as time goes on. It’s just early in this season, for a team that — as hard as it may be to believe — is different from last year’s. I still think they’ll be better when all is said and done. I just wish I didn’t already have so much undermining that belief so soon.

Ballpark Chatter

“We acquired and signed right-handed guys to face left-handed starters and we’re gonna give them an opportunity, especially early in the year here, to hopefully handle left-handed pitching for us.” — Orioles manager Brandon Hyde on the team’s righty-heavy lineup Sunday

I am not here for lineup talk. (That said, I’ve agreed to discuss it on this week’s Banner Baseball Show — tune in!) Let me just say that this is completely valid and completely worth being frustrated over. If the Orioles can’t play Ramón Laureano and Jorge Mateo against lefties, then they don’t really have a lot of use on this team, so you may as well use them in those roles. It’s better to figure out if they can fulfill those responsibilities in April than in August. It’s just a tough watch.

By the numbers

12

After making history by grounding into just 71 double plays last year, as Slate uncovered during the spring, it should come as no surprise that they’re tied for the league lead with 12 already this year. Baseball, am I right?

On the farm

Brandon Young

Right-hander Brandon Young is off to a great start at Triple-A Norfolk, most recently pitching 5 1/3 scoreless innings with eight strikeouts on Saturday. He walked one and allowed no hits, giving him a 0.79 WHIP after he pitched six shutout innings in his season debut on March 30.

Young does a lot of things well in terms of mixing pitches, locating well, and filling up the zone, but his fastball velocity has historically been a separator for when the results are at their best. He averaged 92.5 mph on his four-seamer after he got to Norfolk last summer, which was his first full season back from Tommy John surgery. Through two starts, he is averaging 93.8 mph now.

That’s a meaningful difference, and one that is going to help his fastball play as he pushes to the majors.

For further reading

🤔 Extensions for young stars: Andy had a useful entry into the discourse about contract extensions around the league last week as he talked to agents about the Orioles’ lack of them.

📊 Heston Kjerstad: This was kind of interesting on Heston Kjerstad at FanGraphs, particularly the part about how he doesn’t pull the ball in the air as often as you’d expect.