Jon Meoli: The Orioles typically don’t waste good starts. They just need a lot more of them.

All too often this year, Orioles starters processing a disappointing start have talked up the rotation’s potential as one of the game’s best.

Far less frequently, they’ve backed that up.

They don’t all need to be no-hit bids into the fifth inning, as Kyle Bradish produced Wednesday. They certainly wouldn’t mind more that can supersede this one as the team’s best of the season.

But, of the myriad ways this team can claw back above .500 and into contention, what with its injury-hit lineup and defensive liabilities, this rotation consistently giving it a chance remains the most promising.

The pitchers certainly can make good on their lofty expectations at some point. For it to matter later in the season, it needs to stop being a question whether they can clear that modest bar.

“That’s something that’s never going to change in this game,” manager Craig Albernaz said. “With all of the changes that have happened over time, the evolution of this game, a couple things always stay true. It’s starting pitching, and defense, timely hitting.”

The Orioles’ deficiencies in all three categories over the first quarter-plus of the season are why, even with a 7-0 win over the Yankees on Wednesday, they’re 20-24 and still finding their identity. The win showed strength in all three departments, though, and clinched a moderately redemptive series win over the team that mopped them out of the Bronx in their last meeting.

Defensively, their frailties are known. Timely hitting can come and go. But this rotation was meant to be a strength, and even with just one outing before Zach Eflin’s season ended and two starts so far from Dean Kremer, the core of this group is intact.

The Orioles believed Bradish and Trevor Rogers could be a strong tandem at the top of the rotation. They traded four prospects and a draft pick for Shane Baz, then locked him into a five-year contract extension before he threw a pitch, because they saw Cy Young potential in the dynamic right-hander. Chris Bassitt was meant to eat innings at a higher quality than any of his veteran predecessors.

Together they’ve pitched 31 of the team’s 44 games. Rogers missed a couple of starts with the flu, but by and large there hasn’t been a lot of disruption with the fixtures of the rotation.

Bradish’s start brought that quartet’s collective ERA to 5.31. If the device you’re reading this on isn’t insured, then skip the rest of this sentence: Based on expected stats, their fielding-independent pitching is 4.40, with the xFIP (which normalizes the home run rate to league average) 4.52, meaning the underlying numbers are better than the actual ones.

Neither is world-beating, and both would fall under the umbrella of not good enough, even though it’s basically equivalent to a quality start of six innings, three earned.

It does demonstrate, however, the first in a set of realistic goals to turn things around. When they — or any Orioles starter — have simply kept the game close, the Orioles typically have won.

Wednesday was the 22nd game in which a starter (or bulk pitcher, in Bassitt’s case Sunday) pitched at least five innings and allowed three earned runs or fewer. They are 16-6 in them, and thus 4-18 in games when that modest bar isn’t met.

Bradish has done so six times, with three apiece from Rogers, Bassitt and Baz. That’s at once not good enough and also not the only reason the Orioles are in the position they’re in.

To me, however, it’s the most easily correctable. Although Rogers acknowledged the team’s overall struggles can put pressure on the starters, the gulf between expectations and reality has been too wide. That means it can make a difference as it shrinks.

Bradish’s in-season tweak to his delivery has yielded two good outings, and the safe bet with him is that, in three months’ time, we will be using this homestand as the starting point of a stretch in which he’s been one of the AL’s top pitchers.

Bassitt is coming off his best outing of the season, and for all the Orioles’ efforts to push Brandon Young down the depth chart over the offseason, he’s given them a chance to win in four of his five starts and is hardly the problem.

Rogers said Tuesday he is confident the results will improve; he nitpicked his cutter command but said his stuff is in a similar place to last year’s breakout campaign and he just has to adjust his sequencing. It was always going to be challenging to replicate last year’s success, yet even the standard expectation for regression would have put his ERA in the threes or fours, not the fives.

He and Baz were meant to provide upside to the group. The former Rays starter was expected to see a natural boost getting out of Steinbrenner Field for half of his starts and to benefit from several bits of low-hanging fruit he wanted to attack with the Orioles’ pitching group.

We’re far enough into this season that the results are dictating that something needs to change. Bradish is seeing the benefit of that, and Albernaz said seeing those fruits could nudge others toward adjustments, too.

“I think when you’re in the clubhouse, when you’re grinding with your guys and you see how hard they work and they’re making adjustments, and you see it come to fruition out in front of you, live, I would think it would merit some of our guys to keep pushing through. They already have that mentality, but to actually see one of your guys that you compete with and are around every single day go out and make an adjustment and it’s showing, I think it’s going to lend some type of reward for us.”

They need it. It might be a while before the Orioles’ lineup is whole, and it’s a nightly puzzle to figure out the best combination of offense and defense that can win. The rotation should be straightforward. They should have a chance to win every time one of these starters takes the mound.

When the pitchers hold up that end of the bargain, the Orioles take that chance. It just needs to happen a lot more often.