The Orioles are combusting, and the Royals can learn from it

So many similarities

Ryan O’Hearn went to Baltimore and, like a werewolf in the full moonlight, turned into a monster. The onetime Royals first baseman had a fantastic 2018 season but spent the next four years consistently being one of the least valuable players in the league, frustrating fans in the process. Over those four years, he had a .633 on base plus slugging percentage in 901 plate appearances. In the three years as an Oriole, he’s posted a .794 OPS in 999 plate appearances.

While O’Hearn is just living his best life over there, Royals fans continue to be angry about O’Hearn but in a different way. How on earth could Kansas City cut him loose and just watch as another, apparently smarter organization made some tweaks and unleash him on their enemies?

Kansas City’s victory over Baltimore in last year’s playoffs aside—two games is not enough to draw any meaningful conclusions, I’m sorry—the Orioles organization tanked at the same time as the Royals did but got more out of it. Since GM Mike Elias took over for the 2019 season, the O’s lost a lot initially but then built a great farm system, won their division, and strung together three consecutive winning seasons. The Royals haven’t accomplished any of that and didn’t get any further in the playoffs than the Orioles have in the last decade.

And so O’Hearn served as a sort of microcosm of the Orioles just being better than the Royals top to bottom. Last April, I was working on a piece titled “The Orioles are a way better org than the Royals, and that should be a wakeup call.”

Not so fast! Well well well, the wise say, how the turntables.

Things are not ok in Baltimore right now. The Orioles’ giant balloon has popped and it is zipping around erratically while making vague fart noises. As I write this, they have lost five games in a row and 11 of their last 13 contests. They have yet to win three games in a row. Baltimore is dead last in the AL East division and is 10.5 games out from first place already, with a 15-29 record that is fourth-worst in baseball.

Primarily, this is because their pitching is a mess. Among their starting pitchers, only one—Zach Eflin, who has spent time on the injured list already—has an FIP below 4.80. They have, like, two good relievers. It’s been a problem.

Secondarily, their platoon of painfully Gen Z white dude named-hitters are in varying seats on the strugglebus. Gunnar Henderson’s performance is revealing that his killer 2024 season was an aberration and not the new norm. Heston Kjerstad fell off a performance cliff and has largely wrestled with overcoming the gap between Triple-A and the big leagues. Jackson Holliday has improved at the plate but has regressed on the field and on the basepaths.

And then there’s Adley Rutschman, who the Orioles took as the first overall pick in the 2019 draft instead of Bobby Witt Jr. With Rutschman and Witt four seasons into their careers, it is starkly clear that the Orioles picked the wrong guy, especially considering that Rutschman has essentially been sliding down the hill of declining performance since his rookie year and Witt is A) doing the opposite and B) two and a half years younger.

When the Royals were bad from 2018 through 2023, it was the result of a string of bad decisions, combined with an inability to adapt to modern baseball, from the previous baseball operations regime. Dayton Moore bumped a candle over in the course of putting together the 2014-2015 World Series teams, and we can blame him for taking a trip to the Chick-Fil-A drivethru for a cookies and cream milkshake while the house caught on fire, but accidents happen and it’s hard to stay as a leader at the highest level of sports. It is what it is. The Royals used the insurance money to put together a better team, whatever.

When the Orioles were bad from 2018 through 2021, it was on purpose. The house had some leaky faucets and some foundation issues, and with some TLC it might have been overhauled with some temporary construction inconveniences. But Elias came from the Houston Astros school of burning shit down and therefore brought a flamethrower. “Don’t worry,” it was like he said while gleefully torching the woodwork, “We’ll have a better house in a few years.”

Orioles fans and ownership went along with it. Unfortunately, that new house has started to show signs of wear on it already, and that was absolutely not the promised result when Elias burned the previous, well-loved house down. So after the horrible start this year, the Orioles fired manager Brandon Hyde. The media wants to know why Elias did it and has questions for the GM, and in most cases after firing the manager the front office or owner will, you know, hold a press conference or something. Not Elias! Elias is apparently not addressing media anytime soon.

If you’ve read Evan Drellich’s fantastic book Winning Fixes Everything about how the infamous sign-stealing scandal developed, you would not be surprised here because the Orioles have seemed to import a lot of the Astros’ culture of “the ends justify the means” and overall “I don’t need to explain myself” vibes, and it’s pretty evident in this interaction. I cannot imagine JJ Picollo ever shunning the media in this way—that’s just not how he is, and that’s not who the Royals are.

This whole thing reminds me a bit of the White Sox from circa 2019-2020 or so, when they had an electric core of Tim Anderson, Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada, Nick Madrigal, and Luis Robert Jr. It also reminds me of the turn of the millennium Royals who had Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Mike Sweeney, and Carlos Beltran. Both squads didn’t do anything with those players, in large part because they were all on different development timelines and were never great all at once (or, for some of those dudes, were never great at all).

There are a few takeaways from this drama. The first is that being in charge of a big league franchise is hard. It sure looked like Elias and the Orioles brass had everything in place for success, but they were wrong. Additionally, having a player like Witt who you know will be an All-Star anchor for the team every year is such an unbelievable advantage.

But, again, it is O’Hearn’s story and narrative that stands out to me. The Orioles were able to bring his career back from the dead, but they haven’t been able to maintain Henderson’s MVP-level play or develop Kjerstad into a useful outfielder or prevent Rutschman from shrinking in the spotlight that being a number one pick brings. No organization will be able to do great things all the time. You just have to do enough great things, know when to move on, and when to push ahead. It sounds so simple. It isn’t.