If you’ve been watching the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Guardians grapple through four interminable games, you might wonder how the Orioles would have matched up with them.
The Orioles spent the last weeks of the season chasing these two teams, and finished 4 ½ games behind the White Sox, who were the final wild-card team. Cleveland won the American League Central.
The four games between the White Sox and Guardians have been the worst postseason series I’ve seen.
In Game 3, Chicago struck out 19 times. While the Orioles set a franchise record for most strikeouts this season, 1,518, they never struck out more than 17 times in a game and have never struck out more than 18 times in a game in their history.
On Thursday night, the Guardians laboriously won, 9-5, in three hours, 39 minutes, and that’s with a pitch clock.
Cleveland used eight pitchers. None recorded more than seven outs. Chicago used seven. Those 15 pitchers combined to walk 15 batters.
That game was hard to watch.
The Orioles swept a series in Chicago early in the season and won four of six against the White Sox. Had the teams ended tied in the standings, the Orioles would have been awarded the playoff spot.
White Sox manager Will Venable, who is a legitimate contender for American League Manager of the Year, started reliever Hagen Smith as the opener in Games 1 and 4, but he’ll use an actual starter, Sean Burke, for Game 5 on Saturday.
Gavin Williams, who started Game 2 and pitched the ninth inning in Game 4, will start Game 5.
Guardians manager Steven Vogt and Orioles manager Craig Albernaz worked closely together in 2024 and 2025, and it’s fun to speculate how Albernaz would have handled his pitching staff in a short series.
The Orioles would have had legitimate starters in Trevor Rogers, Shane Baz and Brandon Young with Chris Bassitt in reserve as a bulk pitcher or long reliever. Bassitt pitched in relief seven times for Toronto in last year’s American League Championship Series and World Series.
Bassitt and Leody Taveras, who was hitless in 16 at-bats in the 2023 World Series for Texas, were the only 2026 Orioles to appear in a Fall Classic.
With Albernaz as bench coach and associate manager, Cleveland advanced to the ALCS in 2024 and was eliminated by Detroit in the wild-card round last season.
Would Albernaz have been tempted to start an opener? He did it twice this season when Keegan Akin opened for Bassitt.
How long would he have gone with a starter? In Game 1 of the wild-card series in 2024, Brandon Hyde allowed Corbin Burnes to pitch to one batter in the ninth inning.
How many pitchers would the Orioles have had on their roster? The Orioles ended the regular season with 14, thanks to September roster expansion, but in the postseason, it’s back to 26 players, and many teams go with 12 pitchers and 14 position players.
In 2024, the Orioles’ bench players included Heston Kjerstad, Emmanuel Rivera and Austin Slater. Jackson Holliday was on the roster, but he didn’t play.
Among their relievers were Danny Coloumbe, Cionel Pérez and Jacob Webb.
The Orioles scored just one run in those two losses to Kansas City on a home run by Cedric Mullins. They allowed only three but lost, 1-0, and, 2-1.
Those games were nerve-wracking for Orioles fans but featured much cleaner baseball than we’ve seen in this Division Series.
Coincidentally, Major League Baseball proposed changing the format of the Division Series, lengthening it from five to seven games in their latest gambit to entice the players to accept a salary cap.
Watching four games of this series has been hard enough. Seven games would be unthinkable.
I had vowed not to write about the negotiations for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement until after the postseason, but I couldn’t help but notice their proposal came just hours before a difficult Game 4 to watch.
The owners would like to cut the regular season from 162 games to 154, thinking they could sell those extra playoff games to networks and streaming services.
The 154-game season would include a Monday off each week, except if a team is playing in a featured game that week. Those teams would have Thursday off.
While the Cleveland-Chicago series has been less than entertaining, the other three series have been fun to watch.
It makes you realize how intense and how different the postseason is from the regular season, and how far the Orioles were from playing in these meaningful games.
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