Peter Schmuck: How the Orioles went from ecstasy to embarrassment on a sunny afternoon in Anaheim

If you believe the baseball axiom that no game is more important than any other during the regular MLB schedule, you can stop reading this right now and enjoy a day off from what remains a very frustrating and befuddling Orioles season.

The O’s lost a game to the Los Angeles Angels on Wednesday that may have been the most significant one they will play this year, though it didn’t start out that way.

It seemed destined to be one of the most uplifting, what with rookie pitcher Trey Gibson pulling himself out of an early-inning struggle to set a course for a big win and Samuel Basallo delivering home runs in his first two at-bats in what was shaping up to be his best all-around performance in the bigs.

It ended, of course, with a flurry of defensive ineptitude in a 10th inning that should not have been necessary.

Why it was so important is simple enough and it goes beyond the seemingly subtle difference between coming home from a tough West Coast trip with a 4-5 record instead of a 5-4 record, or the fact that it could very easily have been a very uplifting 6-3 run that included a sweep of the best team in the sport.

What made it so damaging was how it proved again that this Orioles team – for all the positive things that have happened over the past month – is still the same inconsistent bunch that can’t get out of its own way and keeps squandering chances to sustain a push to get on the right side of the .500 mark.

In a perfect world, they would have come home just two games below sea level, but losing the final two games of the series against the losingest team in the American League dropped them back to six games under.

Who’s fault is that? Well, just about everybody’s, but Wednesday’s loss has to fall in the lap of first-year manager Craig Albernaz, whose mid-game pitching decisions clearly put the team on the course for another ugly come-from-ahead loss.

Gibson gave up two runs on three hits in the first inning but settled down and did not allow another hit. He walked a couple of batters in the third but was so overpowering in the fourth that he bounced off the mound after back-to-back strikeouts in a clear indication that he was bursting with confidence.

He had only thrown 66 pitches and 42 of them for strikes. He was one inning away from his second victory when Albernaz yanked him and brought in hard-throwing lefty Grant Wolfram to face a left-handed-heavy section of the Angels batting order.

Wolfram pitched fine but that isn’t really the point, which was driven home when Albernaz pulled him after the minimum three batters and went back to his bullpen for Tyler Wells. Both of them pitched well, but as MASN analyst and Orioles legend Jim Palmer pointed out during that inning, Albernaz had started the bullpen merry-go-round so early that he was going to have to use almost his entire bullpen to get through the rest of the game.

The explanation after the game was that the bullpen was “fresh,” but what Palmer was saying in not-so-many words was that this was a “too many cooks spoil the broth” situation. When you trot out seven relievers, as Albernaz was then forced to do, the chances of all seven pitching well are pretty low.

The Orioles already had suffered a terrible late-inning collapse in the opener of the Dodgers series and the usually dependable Rico Garcia came unraveled in the eighth, combining with Andrew Kittredge to blow the three-run lead.

Maybe that all would have happened anyway, but if Gibson had not been hooked an inning early, Albernaz might have had more options in the late innings, which also featured a rocky seventh-inning performance by Yennier Cano that forced Garcia into the game earlier than planned.

And then there’s the matter of an offensive lineup that went back to sleep after Basallo’s second home run in the third inning, managing just one hit until the O’s scored a go-ahead run in the top of the 10th on a leadoff single by Taylor Ward and a clutch two-out hit by Pete Alonso. This, the day after they did not manage a hit through the first five innings against an Angels rookie starter who entered the second game of the series with a 12-plus ERA.

Throw in three defensive screwups and the series finale was a game the Orioles looked like they were trying to lose.

So, they could have been headed home to face the Washington Nationals this weekend with a chance to head into the second half of the season on a roll but will have to depend on their oft-cited “resilience” to stay in this year’s weird race for the final wild card playoff berth.

Good luck with that.