The Orioles stumbled to their worst losing streak in more than two years, five in a row against the Houston Astros and Cleveland Guardians. They responded with wins over the Guardians and Texas Rangers to finish the season’s first half 51-30.

Here are five things we learned from a trying week.

Baseball will humble even the best teams: They looked like the No. 1 team in baseball — first in runs scored and fewest runs allowed, on pace to win 107 games coming off a 17-5 thumping of the New York Yankees and series victories over the Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies.

The Orioles flew to Houston at the end of last week feeling as golden as they had in at least a decade. Not even the loss of Kyle Bradish could blemish their sheen.

What folly it is to be blinded by such optimism in a sport that routinely humiliates its most dominant clubs. Just ask the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 65.8% of their regular-season games from 2019 to 2023 and have exactly one pandemic-asterisked championship to show for it.

The Orioles won 101 games last year and actually upped their pace through the first 74 games of this year thanks to the strides taken by their young stars and the presence of a true ace, Corbin Burnes, atop their rotation.

Over the ensuing five games against Houston and Cleveland, they lost every which way.

They pounded out 18 hits, four home runs and 11 runs in the series opener against the Astros but gave up 14 as Grayson Rodriguez and a pair of relievers melted down.

Their bats went missing over the next two games as the Astros knocked around Burnes and Albert Suárez.

Rookie Cade Povich kept them in it after a rough opening Monday against the Guardians, but their offense couldn’t do enough with Cleveland ace Tanner Bibee in a one-run loss. They reawakened to blast four home runs Tuesday only for the Guardians to tee off on Cole Irvin and take advantage of an errant Brian McCann throw with four unearned runs.

So much ugliness to digest, but what did it really tell us about the state of the Orioles as they hit the midpoint of a season that will almost certainly end with them in the playoffs?

Well, the obvious thing is that they’re dead in the water when opponents hit both Burnes and Rodriguez in the same five-day span. If that happens in October, they’ll go home quickly once again. But neither pitcher has given us reason to worry these starts were more than disappointing one-offs.

The back of the rotation, with Bradish and John Means out of the picture, is another story. Suárez and Irvin exceeded all expectations in helping the Orioles get through the first half, but both have been hit hard in recent starts. Dean Kremer (triceps strain) hasn’t pitched well in three rehab starts, so it’s fair to wonder how effective he’ll be when he comes back, possibly next week. Povich has flashed promise and grit in each of his four starts but struggles with command lapses.

None of this is news to nervous fans whose calls for a trade grow more belligerent by the day. The problem is that another team has go reciprocate, and the list of potential sellers remains nebulous. Yes, the Chicago White Sox will likely trade Erick Fedde and perhaps Garrett Crochet, but there’s no reason they have to leap now if they perceive a five- or six-team market developing.

The Orioles might have to ride out a month of uncertainty with their rotation, relying on offense to carry them as they take advantage of the cushion they built in the standings. There are no perfect seasons in baseball.

Grayson Rodriguez is one of the five most important players on this team: The Orioles’ losing streak began with Rodriguez’s worst start of the season and ended with one of his best. That did not feel like a coincidence.

Burnes is the Oriole most likely to deliver a quality start and thus the club’s greatest ballast against lengthy downturns, but a contender needs more than one of those guys. With Bradish gone and the Orioles’ trade prospects uncertain, that burden falls on the 24-year-old Rodriguez, who looked ready to bear it as he navigated seven tense innings Wednesday against the American League’s top team. The Guardians drilled home runs off him in the second and fifth innings. He was not finishing off batters with whiffs. But he never lost his way as he had five days earlier in Houston. He was content using his power fastball and changeup to induce groundouts and pop flies until the strikeouts finally came in the last two innings.

We’ve seen that maturity, that ability to contain fires, more often than not from Rodriguez in his second season.

“He’s learning how to pitch deeper in games, learning how to pitch to weak contact early in counts,” manager Brandon Hyde said Thursday. “He’s just learning how to pitch, not trying to overpower people. And then the changeup got better as the outing went along. He punched out the side in the seventh inning. That showed me a lot of growth.”

You’ll hear Orioles fan declare Rodriguez a No. 3 starter, not a No. 2, as if there’s a clear line between those species. But honestly, why put that cap on him?

Rodriguez was the top pitching prospect in the sport. His fastball velocity — 96.2 mph average — is outstanding for a starter and his strikeout rate is very good thanks to that killer changeup. Since he became a rotation fixture last July, you can count his truly poor starts on one hand.

That’s a very good pitcher whatever mystic number you wish to assign him. Which is good news for the Orioles, because they’re depending on Rodriguez more than any pitcher but Burnes.

The halfway point gives us another occasion to say, Gunnar Henderson — holy crap!: Do you ever find yourself typing “Gunnar Henderson stats” into your search bar and falling into a 10-minute reverie?

We’re at that convenient juncture of the season when we can just double a guy’s hitting line and call it a projection. So yeah, the Orioles’ 22-year-old shortstop (he turns 23 on Saturday) is on track for 144 runs scored, 92 extra-base hits, 52 home runs, 114 RBIs, 26 steals in 28 attempts and 90 walks in an offense-depressed environment. Boy howdy.

Dig a little deeper and note that as great as Henderson was in April, when he came out of the gate tearing the cover off the ball, he has been far better in June, consolidating his fearsome power with a skyrocketing walk rate.

As pitchers gear plans to limit his impact, he’s turning their care against them. Henderson’s violent bat discard after taking ball four has become a signature, epitomizing his competitive ferocity. But the real point is that he’s seizing so many more chances to go to first base and unleash havoc from there. At this rate, he’ll exceed his 2023 walk total sometime next month and set a single-season Orioles record for runs scored (Roberto Alomar scored 132 in 1996).

All these cold digits, stimulating as they are for us baseball geeks, only hint at the aesthetic marvel of a middle infielder who’s built like a middle linebacker scorching balls over the fence, barreling around the bases and whipping bullet throws on the run.

Hyde recently said he’s running out of ways to gush about Henderson, which makes sense because the guy is a brilliant show that runs every day. But we can’t let ourselves take this for granted.

When was the last time an Oriole did so many things daily to make the team win? Cal Ripken Jr. in 1991? But he didn’t run or draw walks like Henderson.

Alomar in 1996 was as complete a ballplayer as you’d ever want to see, but he didn’t have this kind of raw power, even in a friendlier age for hitters.

Maybe 2015-16 Manny Machado, another prodigy who combined easy power and otherworldly defense?

Henderson is the team’s best table-setter, best table-cleaner, best baserunner, most impactful defender.

Last week, we bade farewell to Willie Mays. These are the same kinds of superlatives a New York Giants fan might have dropped on the “Say Hey Kid” in 1954. Don’t take that as a comparison. No one is Willie Mays. It’s just another way of saying that what we’re watching is extraordinary.

What a difference a year makes: They’ll never forget standing along the dugout railing, watching glumly as the Texas Rangers celebrated sweeping them out of the American League Division Series.

“You make yourself watch a little bit,” catcher Adley Rutschman said in the aftermath of last October’s crash. “You gotta tell yourself you’re going to be there next year.”

Eight months later, the Orioles downplayed the import of hosting the Rangers for the first time since that punishing disappointment. A weekend series in June ain’t a playoff rematch, they said.

This time around, they’re the club with the powerhouse offense (on pace to hit 272 home runs) and the Most Valuable Player candidate at shortstop. The Rangers, meanwhile, have struggled defending their World Series championship, with stars Corey Seager, Marcus Semien and Adolis García hitting below par and would-be phenoms Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter (currently on the injured list) yet to ignite. The same lineup that battered the Orioles for 21 runs over three playoff games came into Thursday’s game tied for 17th in runs per game and 20th in OPS+.

The Orioles piled it on their nemesis Thursday, with the big early blows coming from Jordan Westburg and Heston Kjerstad, hitters who’ve made huge strides since last these teams met. Whether they would say so or not, it had to be at least a little fun to mark their progress against the foe that bullied them.

The Rangers’ struggles also remind us (and the Orioles) how difficult it can be to stay on top and how crucial it is to convert in October when the chance is there.

Hyde talked before the game about how the Chicago Cubs he helped coach did not come out as sharp in 2017 after they broke that franchise’s 108-year World Series drought in 2016.

With their bevy of outstanding young hitters, these Orioles resemble those Cubs. They’ve seen enough already that they won’t go into this October lacking urgency.

The Guardians are going to be a problem come the postseason: If fans felt cocky coming off last week, it was in part because of the perception that the Orioles had just handled the two most formidable foes in the sport. Order them however, but Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia topped most power polls, with the starry Dodgers looming.

Which was all a bit insulting to Cleveland, the surprise class of a surprisingly classy AL Central.

The Guardians aren’t the most most powerful team, the fastest or the most adept at getting on base. They don’t have established stars in their starting rotation, and their best player, third baseman José Ramírez, might be the most underappreciated in the sport.

The Guardians just do everything well, putting the ball in play with hard contact, applying pressure on the bases, saving runs with defense and striking out batters at the highest rate in the league. Beyond Ramírez, potential batting champ Steven Kwan and the rapidly ascending Bibee, their crown jewel is a bullpen that features four high-leverage relievers with ERAs below 2.00.

As the Orioles quickly discovered, you don’t want to be behind this team going into the seventh inning.

There are reasons to believe the Guardians might come back to earth slightly in the second half.

Relief pitching is volatile. Two of Cleveland’s lights-out quartet, Hunter Gaddis and left-hander Tim Herrin, posted 4.50 and 5.53 ERAs, respectively, last season.

Kwan’s .386 batting average on balls in play probably won’t hold up.

But there’s nothing in this team’s statistical profile that screams fluke. The Guardians beat the Orioles with pitching and defense one night, then went blast for blast with them the next. We’ve seen dominant bullpens take over postseasons — think of the Kansas City Royals team that swept the Orioles out of the 2014 ALCS and won the World Series a year later.

We will spend much of the next three months talking Orioles-Yankees, but don’t be surprised if Cleveland is the ultimate obstacle on a road to the World Series.