Jon Meoli: The Orioles’ biggest early-season test comes this weekend in New York. Their stars need to ace it.

It’s been a sobering week, processing that the highest-probability outcome of this Orioles season is that they spend most of the summer floating around .500 with baseball that’s equal parts tantalizing and frustrating.

That doesn’t temper the expectations for this upcoming series in New York against the first-place Yankees. It’s their biggest test yet, and it has the feeling of a series that will hinge on their stars, both at the top of the lineup and the top of the rotation.

In a high-profile series like this, nothing would change the trajectory or perception of this Orioles season more.

The Orioles are certainly not limping into the Bronx. They might have finished April with their best play to date, but even with this series win against the Astros and a 15-16 record as May begins, we’ve seen that best only in fits and starts.

They’re a resilient team that has won games because they have the ability to rally late and a bullpen that more often than not keeps things close. They entered the season with six proven major league starters and are down to three with Trevor Rogers’ flu-induced trip to the injured list, and they will need to tap into their rotation depth for at least two games in this four-game wraparound.

Given how they’ve played and the results so far, none of that is disqualifying from a competitive series. These Orioles are in almost every game, and even the ones they seem like they’re out of they can claw back in.

Pete Alonso noted this week that the mark of a good team is winning that type of game and that the Orioles could be “battled-tested” by the end of the season for handling a challenging month of injuries and uneven play as well as they have.

That’s all fine and true. But whatever callouses they have built are only valuable if they’re good enough to have that be a separator come October. And to do that they’re going to have to win with what’s meant to be a separator now: their stars.

We can comfortably count Adley Rutschman among them, what with his four home runs and 1.067 OPS in what’s been a total career revival. Taylor Ward has been as steady as they come in terms of getting on base and taking good at-bats at the top of the lineup.

Gunnar Henderson has nine home runs but has had an uneven start, with a .764 OPS and a lot of frustration demonstrated between those blasts. Alonso is hitting the ball plenty hard and taking good at-bats but returns to New York, where he played across town for the Mets, with a .668 OPS and four home runs.

There haven’t been many games when none of these top four hitters has produced. There’s not much correlation between when the Orioles have their biggest offensive days from that group and when they win games. No better time to align that than this weekend, when they come up against one of the top rotations in baseball.

That will be a challenge to emerging contributors such as Samuel Basallo, Jeremiah Jackson and Dylan Beavers, and the Orioles will need their production to continue, too. That’s not going to change the perception of this club in the same way their top hitters throwing the team over their shoulders and carrying it to a big weekend in New York would.

That’s the type of weekend that would make baseball take notice, and to this point nothing this team has done has risen to that height. They’ve mostly been floating under the radar, and even if I suspect the underlying play will continue on that path for a while, there’s value to making early statements when the chance arises.

And it applies to the rotation, too. Chris Bassitt, after his best start in an Orioles uniform, accused the group of being “too cute” throughout the year when they’re “way too good to be cute out there.” The Orioles’ rotation is in flux, but two of the games will presumably be started by Kyle Bradish and Shane Baz, two pitchers to whom that accusation applies.

Those two and Rogers were meant to be the upside drivers in a rotation that didn’t feature a proven ace, and all three enter May with ERAs in the 4’s and less success than you’d expect.

Manager Craig Albernaz said this week he still expects the rotation to be a strength of the team once everyone finds his form. They don’t need to make a truth-teller out of him this weekend, but again, it would help.

That’s what it takes to beat good teams — star players living up to that billing — and the Yankees are, through one month of the season, the team that the rest of the American League is trying to measure up to.

We have a month-plus of baseball to suggest that the way the Orioles play is sufficient to keep the floor from collapsing. Nothing wrong with that. But everyone knows they’re going to need more than that to win in October, and the first chance to show that they have the juice atop their roster comes Friday in New York.