Peter Schmuck: Clearly, inconsistent Orioles failed to make a case for staying the course

There’s no way to be sure what Mike Elias would have done if the Orioles had cold-cocked the Philadelphia Phillies over the weekend instead of going out without a bang in the final two games of the seemingly crucial three-game series at Oriole Park.

I’m guessing it would not have changed all that much, even though I wrote a few days ago that he shouldn’t “blink” and abandon the club’s quest to recover from a disappointing first four months of the season and make the playoffs.

“First of all, we lost a couple of games to the Phillies, and we are at the point where game-by-game results kind of gyrate the odds a little bit,’’ Elias said during a post-deadline Zoom call with reporters. “It was not a major factor, but our play over the weekend was not helpful.’

Elias also insisted that he hasn’t given up on this season and still thinks the O’s could end up in the playoffs, but trading popular Adley Rutschman with one more year remaining under club control certainly isn’t going to make the president of baseball ops more popular with the fan base … even if he did get a nice package of top Red Sox prospects.

The O’s may well be a sub.500 team for the duration. After all, as one great football coach was fond of saying, you are what your record says you are, and that might appear to be the case to anyone who spent the first four months of the season watching a group of hitters that routinely spends the first five innings of games deciding which two of them will get a hit.

What the Orioles have been from the start is a promising team that doesn’t play together well. I was hoping that they would establish better chemistry as the season progressed, but that hasn’t happened yet and Elias can be forgiven for not assuming it will and holding on to two valuable players (Rutschman and outfielder Taylor Ward) who didn’t figure to remain with the team long-term.

Still, I had hoped that the space between being a buyer and a seller would be wide enough to accommodate the middle ground that Elias seemed to be aiming for when he framed the team’s approach to the midseason trade deadline during a dugout media conference before Friday night’s series opener against the Phillies.

Maybe the middle ground was holding onto starter Trevor Rogers, who is only under contract for the next two months. Maybe Elias will soon surprise us and announce one more rich, long-term contract for Rogers that locks in the young four-man nucleus of the pitching staff for the next five years.

It was not unreasonable to believe that the Orioles might still have been able to reach the postseason with the team as originally configured, though only because of the strange competitive malaise that settled over much of the American League this summer.

It’s still not impossible. They entered Monday’s schedule just 2 ½ games out of the third AL wild-card berth, which would mean that they could wedge into the playoff picture with a string of five or six wins. But the way they teased us with their recent seven-game win streak and immediately squandered that momentum is how we got here.

The fans can still dream. They’ve still got Gunnar, Jackson Holliday, the Polar Bear and those solid starting pitchers, but instead of adding another effective bullpen arm, Elias traded one of their most dependable relievers, Tyler Wells, to the Tampa Bay Rays along with sending Rutschman to the Red Sox.

So much for the old saw about not trading significant players inside your division.

Elias also addressed that Monday evening, saying that the teams most hungry for catching help happened to be in the AL East and it came down to the best return for the three-time All-Star.

There is an argument to be made that regardless of the Orioles’ chances of slipping into the playoffs, they clearly were not a team destined to get deep into the postseason and the front office needs to steer the team into a position where it can make good on its next playoff run.

That might be true, but for the fans of that team, making the playoffs is still something, and it would provide some solace heading into an offseason of likely labor strife.

Maybe the weekend trade that sent two-time Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal to the gold-plated Dodgers helped persuade Elias that there was no point in trying to make a miracle run at the World Series.

Hard to argue with that.