On Monday night, the Orioles fought back from a 7-1 deficit going into the bottom of the 6th inning. At that point in the game, according to MLB's win probability measure, the Diamondbacks had a 97.1% chance of winning the game. The numbers weren't looking promising for a comeback.
Most of the time in baseball, the team leading by six runs in this scenario ends up winning. However, the O's found a way to rally in the 6th, 7th and 8th innings to score eight unanswered runs and complete their sixth win in seven games.
Good teams dig deep, and in the bottom of the 6th, the 2026 Orioles showed fans why this team and season may very well be different than 2025.
Let's Rewind to April 9th, 2025. Chase Field. Orioles lose 9-0.
Just over one year ago to the day, the Orioles were in Arizona for a three-game series against the Diamondbacks. They had just come off of a tough one-run loss the night before at Chase Field and were hoping to win game three and take their first series of the year against a very winnable opponent.
Unfortunately, game three was over before it started. Dean Kremer gave up five runs in the first three innings (sound familiar?), but different from Monday night, last year the offense went silent, and the Diamondbacks fans watched the Orioles roll over. No fight. No rally.
This type of result is one that the 2025 Orioles came to expect when they went down early. The 2026 Orioles...maybe not.
For the 2025 Orioles, this type of game happened 38 times.
We'll call these games, "dead-on-arrival", since the 2025 Orioles never really put themselves in a position to win these types of games. Thirty-eight games, second worst in all of MLB outside of the Colorado Rockies, where Baltimore scored two runs or fewer and lost by three or more.
This wasn't just a pitching problem or a bullpen problem. This was a team that couldn't fight from behind. A lineup that went silent when trailing. A bench that couldn't spark a rally. The Orioles finished 75-87 last season and they missed the playoffs by a margin that felt inevitable long before September.
The Invisible Deficit
Here's what makes this stat so insidious: these DOA games don't feel like losses.
When the bullpen blows a 4-1 lead in the ninth, you remember it. But when the Orioles fall behind 4-1 in the third and lose 6-2? That's just a Tuesday. You check the box score, shrug, and move on. Except, those games add up. By the end of May, Baltimore was 21-36 and already staring at a double-digit deficit in the AL East. In the first two months of the season, the O's accumulated 15 DOA losses.
The April Hole
The Orioles home opener was against Boston on April 2nd. They lost 3-0. Zach Eflin took the loss. The offense managed five hits. It was the first of eight DOA losses in April alone. They were shut out four times in one month, and the 2-24 loss to Cincinnati (at Camden Yards) was the worst defeat in franchise history since 2007. By April 30th, the Orioles were 12-18. They'd already played themselves into a hole that would define their season.
The May Spiral
If April dug the hole, May made it deeper. The Orioles went 9-18 in May, another losing month, another step backward. And the DOA pattern continued: seven more games where the offense went silent and the outcome was never in doubt.
The low point came on a road trip through Minnesota and Anaheim:
Date | Opponent | Score |
|---|---|---|
May 6 | Twins | 1-9 |
May 7 | Twins | 2-5 |
May 8 | Twins | 2-5 |
May 10 | Angels | 2-5 |
Four games that led to four losses. Seven total runs.
The Orioles returned home from that trip at 14-24. The season was six weeks old, and they were already playing from behind in a division race they'd never rejoin.
The Offensive Disappearing Act
Let's start with the most basic problem: the Orioles didn't score enough.
Baltimore ranked 25th in MLB in games scoring 5 or more runs. When your offense only shows up two or three times a week, you're putting enormous pressure on your pitching staff to be perfect. And when the pitching was far from perfect, the team fell behind early in games and there was no cavalry coming.
The early-season numbers were particularly brutal:
Month | Games Played | Games with 2 or fewer runs | Games with 5 or fewer runs |
|---|---|---|---|
April 2025 | 25 | 9 (36%) | 20 (80%) |
May 2025 | 27 | 9 (33%) | 22 (81%) |
In April, the Orioles scored five runs or fewer in 80% of their games. In May, it was slightly worse, the Orioles scored five runs or fewer in 81%.
The Inability to Put Up Crooked Numbers
Comeback teams have a knack for the crooked number. Down 4-1 in the sixth? Put up a four-spot and flip the script. That ability to explode for a big inning, to make an opponent's lead feel unsafe, is what separates teams that rally from teams that fade.
The 2025 Orioles rarely had that gear.
When they fell behind, they chipped away with solo shots and sacrifice flies. They didn't have the lineup continuity to string together the hits, walks, and mistakes that produce a five-run inning out of nowhere. Playoff teams could bury you in a single frame. The Orioles couldn't, and when you can't produce crooked numbers, every deficit feels steeper than it is.
Keeping the Deficit Margin Below 3 Runs Throughout the Game
Good teams find a way to keep games close and to limit the damage in any particular inning. In 2025, the Orioles had 68 games where they trailed by at least 3 runs at any point in the game. This was tied for 5th highest among all 30 MLB teams.
Here's the breakdown of the top and bottom of this list. You'll notice the difference in the teams at the top, and those at the bottom:
The teams at the top were clearly not playoff teams last year. The ones on the bottom? All but one made the playoffs in 2025.
In fact, this trend seems to hold some statistical weight. We ran a correlation to measure the relationship between a team's count of games trailing by 3+ runs and whether they made the playoffs that season. What did we find? Teams that spend fewer games in large deficits are significantly more likely to reach the postseason.
Important caveat: Correlation isn't causation, trailing by 3+ runs doesn't cause teams to miss the playoffs so much as it reflects the same underlying qualities (rotation depth, bullpen reliability, run prevention) that determine October eligibility. A team that fixes its deficit problem without improving its pitching hasn't actually changed its playoff odds. Still, this pattern serves as a useful diagnostic: it distills several hard-to-quantify factors into a single, observable number that separates contenders from pretenders with surprising consistency.
In this instance, you can clearly see the Orioles limited the number of games where they were in this situation in 2023 and 2024, making the playoffs in both of those years. However, they regressed in this area last season and mirrored more of their 2021 and 2022 performance.
Has There Been Any Difference So Far in 2026?
There seems to be slight progress on this front in the early goings of 2026. When comparing the first 17 games between the two seasons, the number of DOA games have dropped from five to three:
2025 | Score | Deficit | 2026 | Score | Deficit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3/28 @ TOR | L 2-8 | 6 | 3/28 vs MIN | L 1-4 | 3 |
4/2 vs BOS | L 0-3 | 3 | 3/30 @ TEX | L 2-5 | 3 |
4/4 @ KC | L 2-8 | 6 | 4/5 @ PIT | L 2-8 | 7 |
4/6 @ KC | L 1-4 | 4 | |||
4/9 @ ARI | L 0-9 | 9 |
Additionally, we've seen two good comeback wins, including the one on Monday night and the other on 3/29 against the Twins.
However, the Orioles have trailed by 3+ runs in 8 of their first 17 games this season (47%), which is tied for 4th highest in MLB:
Date | Opponent | Result | Max Deficit |
|---|---|---|---|
3/28 | vs MIN | L 1-4 | 3 |
3/29 | vs MIN | W 8-6 | 4 |
3/30 | @ TEX | L 2-5 | 3 |
3/31 | @ TEX | L 5-8 | 5 |
4/3 | @ PIT | L 4-5 | 4 |
4/5 | @ PIT | L 2-8 | 7 |
4/10 | vs SF | L 3-6 | 5 |
4/13 | vs ARI | W 9-7 | 6 |
This issue alone won't make-or-break their playoff chances, but finding ways to limit damage throughout the game and putting up crooked numbers will surely go a long way towards their hopes of playing October baseball.
The Orioles need to prove they can fight back. They need to prove that falling behind doesn't mean giving up. They need to produce the rallies, the crooked numbers, the come-from-behind wins that turn a 75-win team into an 85-win team. They also need to limit the damage on an inning-by-inning basis, and find ways to not dig themselves into too many holes. They need to prove that their game-by-game chances are no longer dead-on-arrival.
Through ~10% of the games in 2026, there are glimmers of hope that things are moving back in the right direction, but questions still remain.
Data sources: MLB Stats API, win probability analysis via Baseball Reference. Special thanks to Matthew Plotnick for the original win probability and game outcomes research that informed this analysis.
