Don’t mistake this for some finger-wagging about early-season overreaction. Watching the Orioles’ winless weekend in Pittsburgh felt the same way it does when a show returns and you remember only after picking it back up that you’d decided it stopped being good a long time ago.

This is the burden of the 2026 Orioles until they shed it, and this week in Chicago, a sweep that brings them back home at .500, just like they left, probably doesn’t do the trick.

It’s just worth noting how the defining trait of the 2025 Orioles was how everything that could possibly go wrong did, and did so unrelentingly.

And that makes the absence of calamity notable as this club looks to find its footing under new manager Craig Albernaz. And there were plenty of opportunities for disaster to strike.

As the 2025 Orioles were circling the drain in April, the way-too-early Brandon Young spot start wouldn’t have been five scoreless innings in a win — an encouraging sign in a season when the team may need him more than it ever thought.

Gunnar Henderson wouldn’t have popped up and signaled for a challenge after recklessly diving into first base for a single; he would have badly hurt himself. And he certainly wouldn’t have followed it with a late, clutch home run off a lefty for the eventual win later that day.

Kyle Bradish’s self-described “childish” moment — a post-walk sequence of two errors that led to a run — would have cost the team Wednesday’s game. It didn’t.

It doesn’t feel like grasping at straws to acknowledge the absence of bad is, by its nature, good. It’s also pretty flimsy to suggest this team is going to be good because it beat the White Sox three straight games, though last year’s club didn’t win three in a row until late May, after things had cratered.

I don’t begrudge anyone for being skeptical of this team, and I think more people than the usual doom-and-gloom segment of the population are skeptical because of how last year went. I’d point out that, on the evidence, there’s really far less connection to be made to how that team performed and how this one will.

I don’t think we need more than these two weeks of evidence to feel confident that Henderson and Adley Rutschman are back to their best, or that the offseason additions of Taylor Ward and Pete Alonso at the top of the lineup are going to make a difference, or that Trevor Rogers, Bradish and Shane Baz are going to make for a formidable rotation core.

That’s where this team’s upside comes from but also its ballast; the top half of the lineup being productive gives time and space for Colton Cowser, Coby Mayo, Samuel Basallo and Tyler O’Neill to get rolling. Chris Bassitt will have time to beat the Charlie Morton accusations as long as everything else in the rotation is working ahead of him. Series like this where the bullpen sets up well will be more frequent.

All of that will need to be proven out in the coming weeks and months, and doing so remains the only tonic to the palpable unease over this team. It’s not totally unfair to treat this as the seventh month of the 2025 season, or the 10th straight uninspiring month since they looked like the best team in baseball in June 2024. All of that happened, and all of us saw it.

Enough has changed that it’s worth drawing a line ahead of this season and judging it on its merits. Those merits so far are mixed, to say the least. The Orioles are going to have to be better, and we’re not talking about the improvement from bad to just OK they made under interim manager Tony Mansolino last year. The teams that win in October play a crisper brand of baseball than we’ve seen so far.

But, again, the absence of bad — even temporarily — is itself a good thing.