Jon Meoli: The Orioles are getting better at what matters. But nothing will if they keep beating themselves.

Some say it’s drained much of the fun out of the game. I’d argue the opposite.

Given everything in baseball is now measured and quantified, it’s easier to predict how things might go. Locate a sinker in a particular location to a particular batter, and you can do so knowing how likely you are to succeed. Hit a ball at a certain angle and speed, and you can know pretty well what level of production the batted ball will yield.

The Orioles have spent the entirety of the Mike Elias era guided by data-driven principles like that. So, imagine the angst Elias and everyone in his front office — to say nothing of those who watch this team every night by choice — are feeling, knowing all those things are trending the right way and it might not matter.

The fate of not just this season but perhaps Elias’s tenure in charge of the club is in the unsteady hands of the men who make up the 2026 Orioles, a team that has fumbled wins with alarming frequency and can count itself — not the Yankees or Rays or Dodgers — as its most daunting foe this year.

It’s a fair bet the upward trend for the Orioles’ offense and rotation can continue. It’s a lot harder to put your money behind this team getting its act together as the stakes get higher and the margins get thinner.

We’re just past the halfway point, and while the Orioles began the second half with an incomprehensible loss, all games like that serve to do is to cloud the picture of how their season is going. They were 18-23 in their first 41 games and went 20-21 in the next 41. Nothing remarkable there.

They scored 4.4 runs per game in the first quarter and 4.9 in the second, which is an improvement. Their rotation ERA was 5.07 in the first quarter and 3.83 in the second; by fielding-independent pitching, which focuses on what a pitcher can control such as strikeouts, walks and home runs, it’s 4.60 versus 4.19.

These are the things that win games over the course of a season. I suppose you can say that, incrementally, the Orioles have won more as these core components have improved. You can also say they’d have won more, and their outlook wouldn’t be so precarious, if they’d played winning baseball late in the games when they had the chance.

All the defensive miscues — and ones that cost you games — mean all the recent talk about the organization’s need to improve how it teaches defense and the mechanics of a baseball game is warranted.

I’m of two minds about it. I see all the defensive work that happens pregame in Baltimore and at the affiliates, and I have for years. To say it wasn’t a focus before this year is overly dismissive of what happened in the past.

But I’ve also had plenty of conversations with player development staff over the years about ways they felt those things could improve and, somewhat belatedly, it seems those facets of individual and team fundamentals are being addressed.

It matters now because not being airtight late in games means the Orioles have leaked leads they never should have and are farther down the standings than they should be. However it’s addressed, the Orioles can’t get to the playoffs without figuring it out.

We aren’t talking about an impossible ask. They’re a year removed from cleaning things up in the exact manner they need to now. Through June 25 last year, the Orioles were one of the worst defensive teams in the league, with their non-catchers accounting for a fielding run value of minus-20. They improved to 0 — middle of the pack — in the second half.

There are less predictive elements to defensive metrics than other segments of the game. They do a lot better measuring what’s happened over longer periods than they do projecting what will happen going forward.

But with so much going right in other parts of the game, the unstable part of this team being the least knowable in the second half is going to make for an uncomfortable few months. It’s not just about making the plays but making them when they matter. And, with a pretty wide gap to make up just to get to .500, let alone playoff contention, every moment matters a bit more.

Remember, this is a group that has a pair of gut-punch playoff sweeps and a miserable 2025 season in the memory bank, all teaching lessons on what the players need to do to win the way they want to. Maybe you need to win some battles to be credibly called battle-tested, but they’ve at least been there.

And that’s one of the many reasons you can look at the first half this team had and confidently say it should be better. Everything is in place for it to be, and save for the kind of late-inning bullpen help that’s always available at the deadline, there’s the roster in place to win a lot of games in the second half.

If the Orioles do, it’s going to be because the collective arrow up at the plate and in the rotation continues. There’s lots of evidence to suggest it’s going to, and you can dig as deep into the data as you want to prove that.

It’ll take more than that, though. The Orioles will have to outhit and outpitch whoever isn’t in their colors and then stop beating themselves. One of those things is a lot easier to count on than the other.