Peter Schmuck: Still waiting for the real Orioles to please stand up, for better or worse

We’re a couple of weeks away from the mathematical halfway point in the 2026 season, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around this confounding Orioles ballclub.

Is it the team that reeled off 10 wins over a recent 14-game span to fight its way to the threshold of a .500 won-loss record, or the one that just suffered a frustrating extra-inning loss to the Seattle Mariners that felt like a microcosm of the past 2 ½ months.

The Orioles have made a frustrating habit of squandering early-inning traffic on the bases and then awakening in the late innings to either score thrilling victories like the two recent games that were decided by dramatic Colton Cowser home runs or come up painfully short as they did in the 10th inning of Tuesday night’s 6-5 defeat.

So here they are, back to six games below sea level after it looked as though they had finally turned a corner and were ready to climb out of the crowd of American League teams that have mirrored their ambivalent start.

It would have only taken one key out in Sunday’s finale of the series against the Blue Jays and a sudden-death sacrifice fly in the ninth inning Tuesday night to lift the O’s back to within two games of .500 and lift their spirits considerably.

There isn’t room here to list every moment over the past four games that could have altered the course of this four-game losing streak, which is saying a lot since we live in a world of unlimited bandwidth and you’re reading this on the internet. Even though a lot of things went right during the course of those games, it seemed as if just about everything that could go wrong did when it really mattered.

The best example of that probably came during the sixth-inning of Sunday’s game when Blue Jays second baseman Ernie Clement avoided being the front end of an inning-ending double play by running well out of the base line and getting complimented by the umpiring crew for his “gentlemanly” attempt to evade a tag by shortstop Gunnar Henderson.

That ridiculous interpretation of the rulebook sparked a five-run rally that allowed the Jays to win the series. Tuesday’s offensive performance included three key tag challenges on calls that were all too close to overturn, and the O’s also came out on the wrong end of all of the game’s five ABS challenges.

They (and we’re talking about an imaginary group of people who draw unsupportable conclusions and make up cliches about them) say that those kinds of things eventually even out, but that’s small consolation when you just turned a corner and then took a sudden U-turn that killed two weeks of euphoria.

“Yeah, extremely frustrating on a lot of counts,” manager Craig Albernaz said. “One, the biggest thing is we didn’t win the game [tonight]. We went up against a really good pitcher, made him work, had him on the ropes. We just couldn’t get the big hit.”

All of this begs the question … are the Orioles a good team that is still coming together after a difficult start or a so-so team that is what the record says it is?

Wish I knew.

They remain a flawed offensive team that have had far too many games in which they managed one or two hits over the first five innings and far too many key at-bats that went to waste because the young hitters have not been patient enough to make opposing pitchers sweat when in promising RISP situations.

Meanwhile, the pitching staff has allowed 148 runs this season after there were two outs.

This is not a prescription for a sustained playoff run, but there is plenty of time for the Orioles to get their act together. The talent definitely is there, but it has not consistently been expressed and fans can be forgiven if they feel like the last few weeks have just been a tease.

I guess we’ll all find out together.