Kyle Goon: The Orioles must restore their self-belief this homestand — if they have any left

There is nothing I personally can say about the Orioles that should concern you more than the calls coming from inside the house.

Just 50 games in, ahead of the longest homestand of the season, the most cutting critiques are coming from those closest to the team, even inside the clubhouse itself.

One that caught my attention? After Tuesday’s 4-1 loss, starting pitcher Kyle Bradish gave a compliment to the Tampa Bay lineup that flies in the face of how the Orioles have coached their hitters for years.

“Unlike a lot of teams, they’re fine taking a single the other way,” he said of the Rays. “They’re not all trying to do damage.”

The “unlike a lot of teams” landed like a thinly veiled snipe from Bradish, who typically delivers only the most flavorless of quotes even when the Orioles play well. Maybe it doesn’t seem like much — until you add it to other frustrated voices.

TV analyst Ben McDonald teed off on the team’s hitting approach, a comment he later seemed to regret. But McDonald was on target when he added in his MASN postgame analysis: “You either do or you don’t. And right now the Orioles don’t. They are not doing it, and they’re not playing well right now. That’s the bottom line.”

The most concerning thing about the Orioles is not pinpointing their precise issue, because they have issues all over the diamond — as three straight losses at Tampa Bay, all achieved in different phases (in order: starting pitching, lineup, bullpen and defense), illustrated with painful clarity.

The biggest problem is the Orioles and those on the front lines around the team seem to be losing belief internally. Once a team in a slump loses confidence, that’s when the season is really a wrap.

And, yes, it can happen in May.

It’s hard to pin too much on a single stretch of games over the course of a season. But starting Friday the 10-game homestand (Baltimore’s longest of the season) feels like the club’s last best chance to recapture the spark it seemed to have as recently as April.

Was it really less than a month ago when this team was scuffling through a .500 record, summoning a handful of late comebacks and clutch bullpen performances? Was it really just five weeks ago that we marveled as Craig Albernaz emerged from the dugout with a broken jaw as his batters unleashed hell on the Diamondbacks?

It feels so long ago. It honestly feels like a different team.

It’s true that headliners such as Gunnar Henderson and Pete Alonso have not delivered all that we might have expected, but it helped that dudes such as Taylor Ward, Jeremiah Jackson and Rico Garcia were at least keeping the Orioles in the mix on most nights even into the seventh or eighth inning.

Since May, however, the whole enterprise has been listing off its axis. While going 6-13, the Orioles have been outscored by 47 runs and mostly looked outmatched by their AL East competition. The only pursuit that has felt more fruitless at Camden Yards has been Mustard losing 21 hot dog races in a row.

That the Orioles are playing poorly is not news. But the strain at the seams is starting to make everything buckle, which is the most disconcerting sign.

Before summer arrives, you want to give a ballclub every chance to keep hope alive. Indeed, the Orioles are far from out of the race. They are, somehow, just 3.5 games behind a wild-card spot thanks to a thoroughly mediocre American League. In the wild-card era (starting in 1995), nine teams have made the playoffs after losing at least 29 games in their first 50, including Alonso’s 2024 Mets.

But Alonso had the fourth-highest WAR on that Mets team. The best player, by far, was Francisco Lindor (6.8 WAR), who finished second in MVP voting. The Orioles have a player capable of rising to that level in Henderson, but he hasn’t been that guy — and neither have several Orioles that this lineup was counting on to succeed. The ’24 Mets also finished the year with four starting pitchers with sub-4.00 ERAs — a metric none of the Orioles starters currently can limbo underneath.

The point is not merely to keep punching the already beat-up Orioles but to acknowledge the bottom line is close at hand. There comes a juncture in every season when a team either plays to its potential or simply doesn’t. For the Orioles, that juncture feels as if it is right now.

If there’s any scrap of fight left in this roster from its early-season doggedness, it’s time to rediscover it. From the Tigers to the Rays to the Blue Jays at home, the schedule never really fully loosens up after this.

What’s on the line if these guys stumble or even get swept in one or more of these series? Everything.

The entire baseball world is using this opportunity to question every piece of the Orioles’ rebuild under president of baseball operations Mike Elias. He took the team from more than 100 losses to more than 100 wins by rebuilding his way, but the stagnancy since has fueled intense speculation — including from me — about whether he and his staff can finish the job he started those years ago.

It seems silly to expect this team could reasonably contend for a World Series. Even if the Orioles go on the run of a lifetime starting with this homestand, it’s safe to say significant tinkering would be required at the trade deadline to get this group close to even competing for the division title.

But that’s not even what fans can be looking for. The Orioles need to be, at the very least, a team that they can be a little proud of again.

They need to perk up over the next 10 games to show they’re worth investing a little more belief.

As things stand, it’s not even clear they believe in themselves. Nothing said outside the clubhouse cuts harder to the quick than what’s running out inside it.