Just one month ago, The Baltimore Sun Editorial Board called on the Baltimore Orioles fan base not to lose faith in their beloved baseball team despite a 24-2 shellacking by the Cincinnati Reds. Any team can get off to a cold start, we bravely warned. And aren’t they just 4 1/2 games out of first place despite their lackluster start? There’s “too much ball to be played” to panic now. And showing all the expertise that one associates with a group of non-sports writing newsroom reprobates, we even suggested “stranger things have happened” than an O’s turnaround that might put them in contention.

OK, OK, there may have been a little bit of wishful thinking there.

Now that it’s Memorial Day weekend and the Major League Baseball season has passed the quarter-turn, it’s become clear that the American League bottom-dwelling Orioles are not the “Why Not?” team of 1989 that popped back from 54 wins the previous season to the top of the American League East. We will not pretend to have great expertise (surely to the gratitude of our regular readers) but we would hazard a guess that the team’s losses can be traced to their lack of quality hitters and pitchers, at least the non-injured variety. Oh, and given that the team averages more errors per game than most in professional baseball, the fielding isn’t so hot either.

The firing of manager Brandon Hyde just over a week ago was not entirely unexpected under these dire circumstances but it does, sadly, underscore the miserableness of the team’s situation in 2025. How fitting that it took his successor, interim manager Tony Mansolino, nearly one week to record his first victory, an 8-4 extra-innings game that broke an 8-game losing streak. Ouch. The O’s are no longer a franchise that just needs a bit of luck or one or two key additions, or some managerial magic to get back on track. Oh, no. If the Birds were actual birds, they’d be somewhere along the line of crows that poop on your car, not enchanting songbirds in contrasting plumage.

That doesn’t mean we need feel sorry for the players or owner or anyone else involved with the team. Even a rough day at Oriole Park at Camden Yards is a pretty good day by real-life standards. And last we checked, the player compensation was pretty darn good.

No, we bleed orange and black for the Baltimore fan base which is seeing their expectations for this season dashed. It’s one thing for New York Yankees fans to begin the day thinking their team may not take home their 28th title (which, of course, they aren’t given their team is on top of the AL East), it’s another in Baltimore, a city less than 1/14th its size.

So, chin up, Orioles fans. As both Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson have observed, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And real fans root for struggling teams the same as winning teams. Why? Tradition, one presumes, but also because it’s so darn satisfying when the winning ways return. There, we’ve found a little glimmer of hope in this year of deep disappointment. Sorry about that.