The Baltimore Orioles are exactly halfway done with their season. After Wednesday’s win in Houston, the Orioles are 27-54, the worst mark in the American League and only ahead of the Diamondbacks across all of baseball.
Now that we’ve reached the season’s halfway point, it feels like a good time to hand out some superlatives for the positives, negatives and everything else we’ve seen this year.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
MVP: Cedric Mullins
This one is easy.
Cedric Mullins is not only the Orioles MVP but currently has a good argument to finish in the top five for AL MVP voting. He ranks fourth in the AL for bWAR and third in the AL for fWAR among position players, showing that both Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs think he’s been pretty valuable this year.
To put his performance in context, Mullins is currently having a better season than any season from Adam Jones. Mullins has a .942 OPS and the best single-season OPS from Jones was .839 in 2012.
On top of having the best offensive season from a Baltimore center fielder since Brady Anderson in 1996, Mullins has provided excellent defense. The Statcast metric outs above average says he’s in the 98th percentile, making him one of the best defenders in the league.
Mullins decided to give up on switch-hitting and is now having the best season from a Baltimore center fielder in the 21st century. He went from being demoted from Baltimore to Bowie in 2019 to being a pivotal part of the rebuild. Baseball can be funny like that.
Cy Young: John Means
This one is also easy.
Even with a month off due to injuries, John Means is still the only Orioles starter to have a bWAR above 1.0. Using game score, Means has been responsible for seven of the ten best starts from an Oriole this year, which honestly seems low.
Perhaps the most valuable thing Means has provided to this year’s rotation is length. He has pitched at least six innings in eight of his 12 starts, including a pretty memorable complete-game shutout when he no-hit the Seattle Mariners on May 5.
Due to the time missed from his injury, Means isn’t on the pitching leaderboards right now but when you lower the threshold to 70 innings, he’s tenth in ERA and fourth in WHIP. Means isn’t just the best pitcher on the Orioles. He’s been one of the best pitchers in the league.
Rookie of the year: Ryan Mountcastle
For the third time: this is easy.
After an alarmingly cold start in April, Mountcastle has been an excellent hitter from May 1 until now, with an OPS of .893 since the end of April. He’s hit 13 homers in 50 games across May and June, good for a 162-game pace of 42.12 homers.
While Mountcastle hitting for power should be expected, what we’ve seen recently is especially encouraging for his future as a hitter: he’s walking. Mountcastle has seven walks in his last seven games, after walking just eight times in his first 68 games. Unsurprisingly, the increase in walks has come with a decrease in Mountcastle chasing pitches, as seen by this graph.
Mountcastle without any discipline can still be a fearsome hitter but if he’s managed to have a real breakthrough for taking pitches, he can be the best hitter on the Orioles for years to come.
Most frustrating player: Dean Kremer
It feels like a good summary of the season that a majority of the roster would be a good candidate for this award, but I think Dean Kremer is the clear winner here.
One of the main pieces in 2018’s Manny Machado trade, Kremer made a great first impression in 2020 with a trio of strong starts against Yankees and Rays, enjoying a 1.69 ERA through his first 16 innings. An implosion at Fenway to end the season caused his ERA to balloon to 4.82 but still, three excellent starts and one dud was more than plenty to generate excitement that the Machado trade was going to produce a solid young starter.
Of course, this year has not gone quite as smoothly for the former Dodgers prospect.
He’s shown glimpses of his talent like when he completed six innings with two hits and one run against the Mariners but he’s struggled to string together multiple decent starts the whole season. This was best demonstrated by back-to-back starts against the Toronto Blue Jays. On June 19 he rebounded from a poor first inning to toss five scoreless innings and get a quality start. Then on June 24, he had what will likely be the worst start of his major league career, walking five batters and only completing one-third of an inning before being pulled.
While it’s not fair to him, Kremer will always have the added pressure from the fanbase of being part of the Machado trade. No one expects that he’ll be as valuable to the Orioles as Machado but it’d still be nice if trading the best homegrown Oriole since Cal Ripken produced a useful starter for the future.
Pleasant surprise: Freddy Galvis
If I told you in 2019 that halfway through 2021 the Orioles shortstop had more fWAR than Francisco Lindor and Gleyber Torres, you’d probably be surprised, but here we are.
After Jose Iglesias enjoyed a career-high .956 OPS in 39 games last year, he got traded to the Los Angeles Angels for a pair of prospects, creating an opening at shortstop that got filled by Freddy Galvis. Based on OPS+, 2021 has been his season for hitting and his .720 OPS is fifth on the team.
While Galvis is hardly the story of this season, before his injury he provided something pretty valuable: stability. We knew we were getting reliably fine but unspectacular production from Galvis. That’s not exactly glamorous but compared to the production we’ve had from third base, second base and catcher, Galvis might as well be Cal Ripken.
Failed experiment: Cesar Valdez
The fun part of not worrying about trying to contend yet is sometimes you can make a 36-year-old reliever who only throws changeups the closer and see how long it works.
Cesar Valdez was 3-for-3 in his saves during 2020 and earned the chance to deploy the dead fish as the closer to start 2021. After his first 13 appearances, it seemed like the dead fish would continue to successfully protect ninth-inning leads for the Orioles but a May 11 trip to New York to play the Mets saw the wheels start to come off. Since Valdez’s appearance at Citi Field, he has allowed a 1.095 OPS to opposing hitters across 65 plate appearances.
While there’s been plenty of players who have struggled where it’s easy to get frustrated, I don’t feel that way about Valdez and I’d imagine most of the fanbase feels the same. A 36-year-old who just throws changeups getting 11 saves across two MLB seasons is a wonderful story of never giving up.
Of course, the wonderful story now seems to have run its course. Valdez was the exact kind of thing you should be willing to try during a rebuild but ultimately it didn’t survive the first 81 games of the season.
Most surprising win: Orioles beat the Astros on June 30
Is saying the most recent win is the most surprising one an example of recency bias? Maybe. However, let’s break down what happened on Wednesday night to prove my point.
The Orioles entered their series against the Houston Astros with a 1-22 road record after the Means no-hitter in Seattle. Meanwhile, the Astros were 26-13 at home, winning exactly two-thirds of their games in Houston. On top of that, the Astros had already swept the Orioles in Baltimore earlier that month, outscoring them 26-3.
When the Orioles began the series with Thomas Eshelman starting against future Hall of Famer Zack Grienke, it felt Baltimore was getting ready to be swept again, but the exact opposite happened. The Orioles won on Monday in a game where they walked in a run three times and flirted with blowing a 5-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. Then they were victorious again on Tuesday in a game where they used middle reliever Travis Lakins as an opener.
To complete the unlikely sweep, they then turned to Matt Harvey. He entered Houston with a 9.49 ERA since the start of May and it’s hard to imagine many other teams would keep giving him chances to start but here he was, facing maybe the best offense in baseball in their stadium.
While Harvey wasn’t exactly the 2015 version of himself, he still provided 4.1 competent innings allowing two earned runs and four hits. From there, Tanner Scott, Paul Fry and Cole Sulser finished the job without allowing a run and the Orioles had one of the most surprising sweeps in the franchise’s history.
We’ve got 81 games left but I feel confident nothing will be more surprising than finishing a sweep with a past-his-prime Harvey on the mound, on the road, against one of the sport’s most impressive lineups.
Most devastating loss: Twins beat the Orioles on May 31
There’s plenty of candidates, but the final loss in a 14-game losing streak feels like a good choice here.
After going 0-10 on a road trip to DC, Minnesota and Chicago, the Orioles returned home for a Memorial Day matinee to play the Twins. They got six strong innings from Jorge Lopez and on top of that, enjoyed a Ryan Mountcastle homer thanks to a hilarious moment from Rob Refsnyder.
Despite the strong start and the funny homer, the Orioles still managed to lose frustratingly, just as they had in the prior 13 games.
After allowing two runs in the top of the tenth, DJ Stewart drove in the ghost runner and advanced to third on a wild pitch, giving the Orioles three chances to get the tying run to score from third. From there, Ryan Mountcastle struck out, Stevie Wilkerson walked, Austin Wynns struck out and Freddy Galvis flew out and the tying run spent four plate appearances stuck on third to end the game.
The Orioles finally won the next day, but it felt like a perfect summary of the losing streak to leave the tying run 90 feet away to end the game.
BSL Analyst
Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).