ATLANTA – Lost in the haze created by the Orioles’ debilitating start and the ever-growing cloud of speculation about the future of the on-field stars and off-field leaders of the organization is the sun that the entire baseball season revolves around: the games themselves.

Even absent any realistic chance of a winning season, the Orioles now turn their attention toward winning days, which can lead to winning weeks. They missed the opportunity to sweep the Atlanta Braves and post a winning road trip for the first time this year with a 7-3 loss Sunday at SunTrust Park.

But with a 3-3 road trip marking the first time they’ve gone on the road and not lost more games than they’d won before returning home all season, it’s the type of milestone that the 25 in uniform are looking toward now. They can’t trade themselves. They can’t and certainly wouldn’t promote prospects to take their place.

What they can do is just try to play baseball well, and deliver the one thing that’s eluded them all year.

“Just consistency,” manager Buck Showalter said.

“It’s just not a robotic situation where you say, two guys pitch well and everybody’s going to pitch well, or two guys hit well and every body’s going to hit. There’s too much good pitching, too many good guys coming out of the ’pen, too many good hitters. It’s the epitome of a team sport, but it’s played by individuals, and what happened yesterday doesn’t mean what’s going to happen today.”

Games like Sunday’s are the ones the Orioles have played far too often this season. With rookie David Hess on the mound, the Braves led 2-0 three batters into the game, and after left fielder Trey Mancini marked his return to the starting nine after three days out of it with neck soreness with a home run to halve the deficit, Hess gave up three runs in the third inning to make it 5-1.

Mark Trumbo homered off the bench to make it 5-3 in the fifth inning, but that was it for the offense.

“We had a couple of balls that left the park and not a whole lot else,” Showalter said.

Their lack of any sustained offense flew in the face of what worked in wins during the past week, when they strung together a six-run ninth inning Friday night and loaded the bases twice to create all seven of their runs Saturday, thanks to a grand slam by Trumbo and a double by Chris Davis.

Of course, they totaled one hit and one walk in the seven innings they didn’t score in Saturday, and their difficulty carrying that showed Sunday.

“Trumb’s kind of in a good place,” Showalter said. “He’s expecting something, he’s got a good approach, and he’s consistent with it. Adam [Jones] has been that way most of the year, and Manny [Machado] has been that way. But you need a lot more that have got that going to put together a sustained, good offense.”

On the pitching side, Hess broke a run of three straight quality starts from the rotation. The Orioles had pushed through that barrier twice this season, and rank tied for seventh in the league with 35 in 76 games, but they’ve come too sporadically. The entire team is baffled by how when one aspect of the game clicks, another doesn’t. Rare is a day like this when nothing really does.

Yet it caps a week that left the Orioles more encouraged than they’ve been in a while. Their circumstances can’t change. But improvement is required at some point, so why not now? Mancini said that even with Sunday’s disappointment, there was a better feeling around the club during the past week.

“It’s just unfortunate we couldn’t get the win today,” Mancini said. “But especially this series down here kind of felt like us again, in a way, for the first time almost since that New York series in the beginning of the year in the Bronx.”

The Orioles won three of four that weekend, the first of what’s been three winning road series this season. They tried to ignore that this weekend, and save for a few moments, didn’t play like the team that lost their season in between.

“We kind of let go of records and everything like that and we just went out there and played,” Mancini said. “We just played as a team, put a lot of good at-bats together, and the pitchers did a great job this weekend, too. It was a fun series, and kind of felt like us again.”

jmeoli@baltsun.com

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