Welcome to another edition of the Orioles Beat newsletter. The O’s conclude their homestand with two more games vs. the Nationals this weekend before embarking on a seven-game trip through Milwaukee and Boston. BALTIMORE -- The 2025 Orioles wouldn’t be the first team to overcome a slow start and have a successful season. Kyle Gibson has experienced it firsthand. The 2022 Phillies were 21-29 at the end of May, then finished 87-75, secured a National League Wild Card berth, won the NL pennant and appeared in the World Series. The roster featured three current O’s -- Gibson and fellow right-handers Zach Eflin and Seranthony Domínguez. This week, I asked Gibson three questions related to that Philadelphia team, how Baltimore can follow a similar path and the challenges of slow starts. Here are the 37-year-old’s responses. 1. How did the ‘22 Phils turn their season around, and can the ‘25 O’s do the same? Gibson: This has been a tough stretch, where we faced the Twins, where they can’t do anything wrong, and sometimes, it felt like we can’t catch any breaks, you know? So if you can avoid that negative, “Here we go again … we give up a couple runs, and now, we can’t come back” -- if you can avoid that stuff, then before you know it, you can be on a run. I think if you were to ask anybody in the game, “If the Twins can rattle off 10 in a row, do you think this Orioles team could?” Well, yeah. I think we have a good team, just like they do. Sure, it becomes tough when you put yourself behind an eight ball by a slow start. The 2022 Phillies were so much fun because it just ended up being a group of guys that just said, “We’re better than this, and we’re just going to keep playing the game every single day, and we believe in ourselves, and we believe that this group is the group that’s going to do it. And this is how we’re going to do it: We’re going to stick together, we’re going to keep being ourselves and we’re not going to change, we’re not going to become selfish or pull away, and we’re going to lean into each other and just keep having fun.” |
2. Can teams like the ‘22 Phillies, the ‘19 Nationals, the ‘05 Astros and others serve as an inspiration for this team? Gibson: Yeah, I think [they] can be, absolutely. Especially if you believe in who you are. If you have a slow start and then you start believing that you’re a bad team and you don’t expect yourself to meet your own expectations, you shift your expectations to lesser of yourself, well then no, I don’t think you have a chance to recoup that. This type of a turnaround is tough to do because of fighting those types of stigmas, those types of negative emotions that are just going to hold you back. Trying to climb the whole hill in the first 10, 15 feet, right? You can’t do that. You’ve got to go one step at a time. You’ve got to go one series at a time. And I know that’s kind of cliché, but if we sit back here and look at it, for the next two months, if we win X number of series, we’ll say two-thirds of the series, what’s that number going to look like at the end of June? It’s going to look like we’re pretty close or above .500 already. You just have to keep breaking it down in slower steps. You’ve got to keep in perspective of understanding, “Yes, there are teams that have done this, and if we believe that we have a good team, then we should believe that we can do this as well.” |
3. Is it difficult for younger players to keep that kind of perspective? Gibson: It’s hard for veteran guys, you know? I’m not immune to having that be a struggle. First three starts for me haven’t gone the way I wanted them to go. I’ve had fun, but nobody wants to lose. Nobody wants to feel like you’re letting the team down. So yeah, that part hasn’t been fun. But for me to sit back and say, “Oh, well the rest of my season is done, there’s no way I can recover and might as well not even do it,” well, that’s just not the right mindset to have. But yeah, it can be hard for a veteran and young guys. I think the thing that makes it a little bit easier on people who have gone through it is you have that experience to lean on. You have the feeling of what it felt like to turn it around. You have the remembrance and the memories of the conversations and the decisions that helped turn it around. And then, that’s something we can lean on, and hopefully, Zach, myself, guys that have been on that type of a team, we can hopefully lean into guys and say, “Hey, this can happen. This has been done many times, and we believe that we’re a team that can do it.” |
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MLB MORNING LINEUP PODCAST |
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Right-hander Patrick Reilly, the Orioles’ No. 10 prospect per MLB Pipeline, underwent Tommy John surgery Thursday in Arlington, a procedure performed by Dr. Keith Meister. Reilly recorded a 1.86 ERA over three starts for Double-A Chesapeake before exiting his April 19 outing with elbow discomfort. The 23-year-old was traded from Pittsburgh to Baltimore last July 30 at the Trade Deadline. |
Thursday marked the 10-year anniversary of the first game I covered for MLB.com as a D-backs associate reporter -- a 4-3 Arizona loss to Philadelphia at Citizens Bank Park on May 15, 2015. I want to thank anybody who has read any of my stories over the past decade, and I look forward to writing many more in the future! |
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