Jon Meoli: The Orioles’ sweep in New York hurt more than their place in the standings

One win at a time. That’s what the Orioles’ company line will be about how they repair the damage done by this four-game sweep in New York where it actually matters: in the standings.

That feels like the least of their problems now. All that would take is some better baseball — a heater or two from their everyday bats or a good turn through the rotation.

The more enduring damage, incorporeal as it is, has to do with how they’re perceived, both here and around the game. They had a finite amount of time to convince a weary group around Baltimore that things would be different.

Expectations ranged from cautious optimism to trauma-informed skepticism. Everyone, though, needed to see it, and there’s no unseeing what just happened. They can undo the damage in the standings. It’s only four games. But it might take four months of good baseball to make anyone think about this team in a different way.

That’s not going to feel like anything new to manager Craig Albernaz, his staff and his players, all of whom have spent most of this season answering for why this team isn’t as good as they expected to be just yet. It might feel amplified but won’t change what they have to attack to play well enough to change those conversations.

But as intangible as these perceptions are, they matter. They matter at the levels of baseball operations above Albernaz, all the way up to ownership, which has made substantial investments in hopes of contending again and bringing fans back to Camden Yards to spend on all the amenities they’ve added to the ballpark and generate some return on the payroll splurges.

They needed this team to hit the ground running. They needed proof of concept, and even if the team took some time to find its form, they needed something to look at as a tentpole that would hold this thing up while the rest of the roster got its act together.

Instead, this is at risk of being smothered by the weight of it all. Baltimore was salty when I left for spring training in February — for the ice on the roads and for the perceived misses on the free agent pitching market. Albernaz’s camp was full of energy and belief, and they had six weeks there followed by six weeks since to fashion a better team than the one that preceded it.

That foundation might still be intact where it matters most — in the clubhouse — but they haven’t given anyone much occasion to see it. This visit to the high-flying Yankees was the broader sport’s first occasion to really pay attention to the Orioles, outside of the odd moment when their manager gets smoked in the face with a foul ball that sparked an improbable comeback win or when the visiting Red Sox hung 17 runs on them hours before their manager is fired.

What could have been a moment for them to demonstrate everything that was meant to distinguish this team from the 2025 version — its improved rotation depth, the viability of its homegrown core to be the backbone of a winning team, the success of their offseason additions — was anything but.

They will be the first to say that they did nothing well in this series, and that none of it was good enough. I am reminded that not even two weeks ago, there weren’t exactly any on-field strengths for president of baseball operations Mike Elias to highlight when he spoke of the team’s start to the season.

Even in the ways that feel predictable, the Orioles’ struggles defy explanation. The pitchers who were supposed to both elevate their rotation and keep their depth starters in the minors have done neither. Their group of hitters was curiously assembled on paper because they didn’t have roles for all of them, not because they didn’t have enough quality.

Whenever I’m asked, I just kind of shrug and say they’re not a very good team right now. That qualifier is important because unlike this time last year, it feels to me like there’s a good team in there. Maybe not a team that can thump with the Yankees in October, but a team that can win far more often than they have so far.

Betting on Kyle Bradish, Trevor Rogers and Shane Baz to figure it out is a lot different than betting on Charlie Morton and Tomoyuki Sugano to do the same. Betting on the top of this lineup — Gunnar Henderson, Taylor Ward, Pete Alonso and Adley Rutschman — to get in sync feels reasonable.

I bet I wouldn’t have to look hard for someone to book that for me, either. No one has any reason to believe anything other than what this team has shown so far.

After four demoralizing and not particularly close losses in New York, the framing of this season is set. No one is going to think of the Orioles as anything but the team that got swept in New York the first week in May, whether this series was the beginning of the end of their season or the end of the beginning.

That’s going to be a lot harder to overcome than what the Orioles are looking at in the standings.