WASHINGTON – When a good team is in a bad way, there are no easy answers.
If there were, there wouldn’t be any struggling hitters or four-inning starting pitchers.
The Orioles unfortunately have plenty of both and there’s not a lot the coaches and analytics people can do about that other than look for mechanical fixes and try to figure out what kind of motivational approach will work best with each individual player.
If only a guy could just take a confidence pill and go out and throw seven or eight great innings or hit a home run every day, but we tried that already and things got messy.
Manager Brandon Hyde pondered the question for probably the 50th time in the past couple of weeks and admitted Thursday that there is only so much anyone can do other than demonstrate confidence in the players who may be experiencing a crisis of it.
That is particularly tricky with young players who have had great success throughout their amateur and minor league careers and are finding that the major leagues are, quite literally, a whole new and very difficult ballgame.
“Yeah, it’s something you learn up here,’’ Hyde said before the O’s snapped a three-game losing streak with a 2-1 victory over the Washington Nationals. “You learn that it’s not that easy and you learn that when you come up as a young player on a bad team it’s a lot easier than when you come up as a player on a good team that has expectations and people are watching and they’re expecting you to do things. You just have to mentally keep putting your blinders on and continue to go.”
No two players handle that exactly the same way. Colton Cowser hit the ground running last year after batting just .115 in a 26-game big-league audition the previous season. He weathered some tough months and finished second in the voting for American League Rookie of the Year.
Boyish Jackson Holliday seemed overmatched when he got here, was quickly sent back to the minors and dealt with a lot as a 20-year-old phenom with the weight of a “One-One” draft choice hanging all over him.
Holliday, Jordan Westburg, Heston Kjerstad and even third-year superstar Gunnar Henderson have struggled to put together consistent at-bats through the first month of the season. Hyde can point to what is a fairly normal learning curve for their levels of experience, and it’s also normal for young players to overcompensate when things aren’t going well for the team.
“It’s natural,” Hyde said after the Orioles got a strong start from Cade Povich. “These guys are human beings. They’re not swinging the bat the way they want to. The games aren’t going the way we want them to. Been a tough time rotation-wise. We just had two really good starts. If we get good starts, we’ve got a good shot.”
But it’s one thing to draw the obvious conclusion that they are “pressing” and quite another to talk them out of it. I mean, what are you supposed to say, “Hey, kid stop trying so hard. It’s okay to strike out a lot.” Or, if we’re talking about a Povich or Brandon Young… “Relax, that’s just Vladimir Guerrero Jr. coming up. At least it’s not his dad.”
The only thing you can do as a manager is show an abundance of patience and believe that at some point these guys are going to reward it just as abundantly.
“And that’s definitely the message for us right now that we believe in the talent that we have,’’ Hyde said. “These are all guys who are going to have really, really good careers. We’re off to a slow start. Just put the blinders on and go.”
Maybe that won’t fly with the segment of the social media crowd that has grown tired of the guy who won AL Manager of the Year awards for both the ‘22 and ‘23 seasons and the GM that engineered the rebuild that led the Orioles winning more regular-season games than any other AL team over the past two years.
In a sporting era when a long attention span is considered a mental defect, I’d just like to remind everyone that the 2025 season will celebrate its one-month birthday on Sunday.