As far as I can tell, no one is calling for me to be fired or jailed. This has been my spring of reckoning all the same.

The Orioles’ disastrous first quarter wasn’t what anyone expected, and that’s been hard on the fans, players, coaches, and front office.

I’m in none of those categories, and in the spirit of this being an incredibly nuanced thought exercise that requires a level of precision I probably can’t pull off, let me make the first scalpel slice of many.

This hasn’t been hard on me; it’s been really hard for me. We’re talking about decades of watching, writing about and thinking about baseball in one specific way and forging the perspective I carry into this job and projected onto this Orioles team.

That crystalized into the idea that they would be good — potentially very good. The possibility that they still can be is moot. This team is driving me crazy all the same.

So, the questions are the same in this seat as in yours. How the hell did this happen? What am I supposed to think about all this? And am I thinking clearly about this?

I’ll CliffsNotes the background: Baseball left me behind when we moved to the big diamond in Little League, and the seed that brought me back in college — obsessing over prospects — obviously germinated into something much larger.

Scouting, player development and analytics were the prisms through which I viewed the game, and became the core principles of the team I covered once Mike Elias took over after the 2018 season. No one is luckier than me to get to do this, and do it here, given how things have gone. It was also fortunate that that team was terrible, because otherwise it would have been impossible to focus on and absorb the granular level of detail over the years about how and why the Orioles do what they do.

It all made this transition into contention for the Orioles feel inevitable. Of course a collection of really talented young players would create a really talented young team. All the while I was transitioning, too — from beat writer to newsletter writer to columnist (with a side of newsletters).

Consistency and transparency of thought are constant aims here. So is the desire to be informative, and one of the core methods of that has been applying and sharing what I know about how the Orioles’ beliefs and processes inform everything they do. Increasingly, that’s been overlayed onto the major league team and its roster construction. It’s why I never thought they’d change their hitting program as things fell apart last year, and why I never really thought they’d empty the top of the farm system for a controllable starting pitcher.

It’s also why this winter passed the smell test. The Orioles’ aversion to early-round pitching in the draft makes sense to me because of how fraught the space is with potential injuries, the lower hit rate for pitchers compared to early-round hitters, and the potential to find value later. Hard to argue all of that, and applying it to the team’s rotation-building this winter, the lack of desire to give out a massive long-term contract to a free agent starter and assume that risk made sense, too. The results are mixed, considering Tomoyuki Sugano and Charlie Morton are having vastly different seasons.

Same goes for their efforts to fortify their lineup. Knowing the conviction they have in the combination of established and young homegrown players already in place, they really only had a handful of roles to sell to free agents. It made sense that they signed a bunch that fit a specific need — righties who hit lefties well — and judging by their historically bad offense against lefties, that hasn’t worked out at all.

When the Orioles’ health improves and we can judge this team on what it was meant to be, there will still be some duds among this winter’s additions. It’s charitable and also fair to try to untangle the ideas behind the front office’s offseason and acknowledge that parts of the execution failed while the logic was sound.

Elias has been essentially doing this for the last week; last home stand he basically said he still thought this was a good team he put together, and then last week changed his tune to acknowledge that above all else, things have gone badly and their offseason moves didn’t measure up.

Most everything that has happened here since the fall of 2018 was executed so the Orioles can be as good as possible for as long as possible. To have gotten this year’s team wrong may not change their ability to get the main goal right, but you could argue that goal has changed, too.

This is where it gets complicated. For me, there have been plenty of areas worth being critical over these last few years — the handling of young players and the insistence on sticking with certain bench players among them. Where I don’t find those opportunities, it feels more valuable to think critically instead of just being performatively critical for the sake of it. If something questionable happens, does the “why” hold up? If you alternatively remove something from a vacuum or view it within one, does it look the same?

Those perspectives have done me in this spring, to say the least. Every course of action at this point feels incredibly fraught.

I tell myself that the myriad stances I took on this team since last season ended were as informed as they could be at the time, and that the team I envisioned as it was constructed can still meet expectations for the better part of the four months remaining in the season, and a couple things happen. One is the Orioles usually lose feebly within a day to make that idea feel insane. There’s also the fear that riding out that thesis, which appears to be broken based on the first quarter of the season, is going to be a credibility sink even worse than the one created by simply being so wrong in the first place.

Yet, pulling out the shovels and burying the front office for blowing it this winter is a full-on reversal that feels like it would be equal parts disingenuous and cynical. It’s a little paralyzing trying to figure out how much mud I’d get on myself in the process.

There’s mounting evidence that what it took the Orioles to get here won’t be what gets them beyond this point. I’m taking it all as it comes, but that’s a judgment that doesn’t seem like it can be levied more than once. And it might not feel like a big deal for anyone but me to take that position, but it won’t be done flippantly.

That doesn’t leave much space for anything but the here-and-now, which has basically meant a singular focus on the bad baseball the Orioles have played on a too-frequent basis. There is no nuance to catching the ball or throwing to the right base, and very little nuance to pitching or hitting poorly.

While professionally responsible, that doesn’t do much to stop the spiral of thoughts about whether I was wrong and why that was the case. It mostly has the opposite effect. For the same reason anyone reading this burns at how things have gone and yearns for there to be some kind of accountability or consequence for it, my insides just churn.

It’s a constant game of bull in the ring at this point. Pick a direction, take a couple steps, end up on my ass with my head spinning. I twist myself into knots thinking about what to say about this team that meets the moment, then feel dumb for every thought that follows. Stay the course with this team? Might as well get up on the dugout and dance with the Oriole Bird like a fan. Say they blew it this winter? Well, then, so did I, and the extent to which both of those are true doesn’t feel fully baked yet. Find the nuanced path between those? Increasingly difficult by the day.

Spin your wheels that long and you will inevitably get stuck in the mud. That’s basically where I am. This team and this problem are on my mind when I’m planting flowers with my family, at the playground, driving to work, grocery shopping, having a late-night beer or three, driving home from hockey, trying to enjoy my morning coffee. When I’m not thinking about it, the algorithm changes that.

Mostly I see perspectives that are so far from my own that, even with the humble and self-deprecating view of my limited sphere of influence as a baseball columnist, make me believe there’s simply no way I’m doing a good job.

How could anyone say that when I’ve been writing about it for six years and thought I did it well? Can we not separate the ideas that Morton has been incredibly disappointing and that he’s continuing to start because there are literally no alternatives? Does that person really think it’s an indictment on the front office that all these injuries required a lineup featuring the fifth and sixth infielders and outfielders on the spring training depth chart? Should I think that, or more to the point, would I be doing a better job if I did?

This is where we’re at. It’s been inescapable. It’s been disorienting. It’s been professionally disappointing, and that’s made it incredibly dispiriting. It might go on like this all summer or it might be turning.

Either way, let’s refocus on the here and now: This team is driving me crazy.