The Orioles rallied from a wrenching extra-innings loss to take two of three from the National League-leading Philadelphia Phillies at a raucous Camden Yards. From there, they headed to New York for a tense series with the American League East-leading Yankees. Here are five things we learned from a week of soaring highs and plummeting lows.

Kyle Bradish’s surgery added urgency to Mike Elias’ to-do list: Our worst fears were realized Wednesday when the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager announced Bradish had undergone Tommy John elbow reconstruction that morning. The news was expected, but that did not lessen the “huge blow” as the Orioles general manager put it.

When Elias traded for Corbin Burnes shortly before the start of spring training, fans were thrilled not just because the Orioles suddenly had a bad hombre atop their rotation. It was the notion of pairing Burnes with a rapidly evolving Bradish and a maturing Grayson Rodriguez in a trio that could go strikeout for strikeout with any in baseball. The Orioles could be big-boy contenders behind arms like that.

The news that Bradish had received platelet-rich injections to help him recover from a sprain to his ulnar collateral ligament introduced a cloud, but the dream lived right up until he began shaking his elbow last Friday night against the Phillies. He was that good after he rejoined the rotation, if anything even harder to hit than during his 2023 breakout.

Elias now faces a multi-layered dilemma.

Albert Suárez, Cole Irvin and lately rookie Cade Povich have done terrific work helping the Orioles through an injury-marred first half. Dean Kremer is expected back soon. Given their record and strengths across the rest of the roster, the Orioles will go to the playoffs, even if they don’t add a starter. But will they be any better equipped to advance than they were last year?

The Burnes move was made to push them over the hump, not get them back to par. Which is why Elias will have to look hard at trading for a starter before the July 30 deadline. Jesús Luzardo of the Miami Marlins, Erick Fedde of the Chicago White Sox and Tyler Anderson of the Los Angeles Angels are all widely listed as potential targets. None has Bradish’s upside but each could slot into a postseason rotation.

Each would remain under the Orioles’ control next year, which is an important point given that Burnes is headed for free agency and Bradish is unlikely to pitch before late next summer. A deadline move would be about 2025 as much as 2024.

With Bradish out of the picture, we’re no longer talking about a luxury. This is one of the three best clubs in baseball and the contender with the deepest reservoir of tradable talent. Patience was a virtue for the past five years of team building. Now’s the time for action.

The Orioles’ series-clinching win over the Phillies was the pinnacle of their season to date: A weekend series that held so much promise — two of baseball’s three best teams, a divided crowd stuffing every corner of Camden Yards — got off to a gloomy start last Friday when Bradish departed early. An exhausting loss followed by the news of Bradish’s UCL strain had fans cursing the fates.

The Orioles restored some joy Saturday, winning behind a resilient Rodriguez to set up a glorious Father’s Day finale pitting Baltimore ace Burnes against his Philadelphia counterpart, Zack Wheeler. Who would prove steelier in this classic pitcher’s duel?

Or, the Orioles could upset that narrative entirely as they have in a broader sense over the past three seasons. Burnes was tough when he needed to be in his 10th straight quality start but quickly ceded center stage to his hitting teammates, who treated Wheeler to one of the most miserable afternoons of his stellar career.

Gunnar Henderson immediately set the blueprint, fouling off three straight 3-2 pitches before he sent a 96.7 mph sinker screaming 419 feet into the Orioles’ bullpen. A superior at-bat from a superior young player. Watching from the dugout, teammate Colton Cowser felt his confidence flourish. When it was his turn against Wheeler in the second inning, he took an errant fastball and fouled off another before hitting a cutter even farther and harder than Henderson had driven the sinker.

Sensing unexpected vulnerability, the Orioles turned aggressive. Adley Rutschman jumped on a first-pitch fastball for another home run to start the third. In the fifth, Jordan Westburg delivered the coup de grace, lining a 2-1 fastball over the wall in right field to put Wheeler down 8-2.

It was the first time he had given up four home runs and the first time since 2018 he had given up eight earned runs in a start.

What a stunning demonstration of the young offensive talent the Orioles have assembled (and they did it again in the Bronx against AL ERA leader Luis Gil on Thursday). Four hitters, all 26 years old or younger, waited for just the right pitches from a guy who doesn’t miss often and drove them out to right- and left-center, just like the organization’s coaches teach.

Manager Brandon Hyde seemed unsurprised, just deeply pleased by this affirmation of players he gets to write into his lineup.

“Our bats have come a long way,” he said. “The ability to hit premiere pitching like that is not easy. The at-bats that our young guys threw on him, to be able to drive the baseball like that, it’s really, really impressive.”

If the Orioles go all the way this year, their resounding win over the Phillies offered a glimpse of how they’ll do it.

The Yankees’ immediate anger over Albert Suárez hitting Aaron Judge was understandable, but that’s where it should end: Look, who wouldn’t feel instinctively “pissed,” as Judge said he was after taking a 94 mph fastball off his hand in the third inning Tuesday?

We have to understand that Judge is not only the most intimidating hitter in baseball and the current AL Most Valuable Player favorite; he’s a guy who has played just three full seasons since he burst on the scene with 52 home runs as a rookie in 2017. He grasps how important he is to the Yankees and New York, and he’s naturally freaked out by the prospect of losing a vintage season to an errant fastball.

Fine.

Add to that the brewing rivalry between the Yankees and Orioles, who snatched divisional supremacy last season as the Bronx Bombers stumbled and who look like the wave of the future given their endless bounty of top prospects. Few relationships are stormier than those between competing neighbors. Suárez sent that pot toward boiling when his fastball rode in on the Yankees’ best player.

This tension could lead to excellent baseball theater over the next four months, as long as it doesn’t become something more — no guarantee in a sport polluted by unwritten codes. No one needs the top two teams in the American League going all Hatfields and McCoys in a misbegotten beaning war.

You’d have to be a fool to think Suárez, coming off a shaky second inning with a 1-2 count on Judge to start the third, was aiming to do damage. He was simply working inside against a giant power hitter who will engulf the plate if you let him. He lost command of his pitch. It happens every day.

The Yankees best save their sanctimony considering they ranked third in baseball with 40 hit batters after Tuesday’s game while the Orioles were tied for 25th with 24 hit batters. New York pitchers hit two more Orioles on Wednesday, including a 94 mph sinker from Victor González to Henderson’s upper back that felt like it could be intentional (and that ended up costing the Yankees a crucial run).

So, let’s be clear — grumbles about risky pitching styles emanating from the Yankees’ clubhouse are hypocritical at best.

It’s better for all concerned that Suárez’s fastball did not fracture Judge’s hand. Baseball needs its greats at the heart of pennant races. The Yankees hit the Orioles’ MVP candidate the next day, and he kept a cool head. Both sides should leave it at that.

The Orioles have adeptly selected their times to be aggressive on the bases: After more than three hours of tense back and forth Wednesday night in the Bronx, the Orioles finished the Yankees not with their trademark power but with base running elan. Cedric Mullins had just driven in the go-ahead run with a looper to center field and advanced to second on the throw home.

From there, he quickly stole third, hoping to give Ramón Urias a chance to drive him in with a simple fly ball. Even better, Yankees catcher Jose Trevino’s throw sailed into left field, and Mullins scooted home for an insurance run that would stand up as the Orioles’ winning margin.

“Ced gets a single, a lot of times, it’s a double,” Hyde said afterward, reminding listeners why he has kept Mullins in the lineup despite his tepid hitting. “Ced gets to second base, he’s got an opportunity to steal third base.”

Speed equals pressure in baseball, and if it’s deployed with minimal risk at moments when a single run looms large, all the better. The Orioles excel at choosing such moments.

We also saw this in the seventh inning Wednesday, when Henderson stole second after being hit by a pitch and scored on Ryan Mountcastle’s double, a run without which the Orioles could not have made it to extra innings.

Going into Thursday’s play, they ranked 12th in the majors in stolen bases but tied for third in success rate at 84.6% and seventh in percentage of extra bases taken (advancing more than one base on a single or more than two on a double). As a result, they rank fifth in FanGraphs’ all-encompassing base running runs above average.

The Yankees rank last in that metric.

So as much as we talk about the Orioles leading the league in home runs and slugging, they’re also using their legs to create a subtler advantage over their chief rival.

With Willie Mays’ passing, all of baseball bids farewell to a miraculous generation: The ballplayer’s teeth gleamed under his black and orange cap, his portrait set against a wilder scene of him sliding full out to beat a throw at home plate, that same cap having tumbled onto his chest. This was Willie Mays, captured on his 1956 Topps baseball card. Amid all the other images of past greats, his was the one that seized my imagination, though he never played for or against my hometown Baltimore Orioles and finished his career three years before I was born.

A few lives pop boldly enough to transcend time and place.

As Baltimore baseball fans, we mourned the loss of Brooks Robinson’s personal touch, of Earl Weaver’s salty ingenuity, of Frank Robinson’s competitive fury, which, along with his Triple Crown bat, pushed the Orioles over the hump in 1966.

These were intimate losses for the city.

Mays was different. He connected with baseball lovers everywhere, and in the wake of his death Tuesday at age 93, we mourn not just him but the age to which he was one of the last living links.

He played in a time of giants: Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente.

Of them all, it was Mays who showed what it meant to master every phase of the game. He hit 660 home runs but would have breezed into the Hall of Fame with half as many. In center field, he could run all out with his back to home plate and still intersect miraculously with the descent of a deep fly. On the bases, he made opponents look like Little Leaguers — never throw behind him the axiom went, because he’d just keep going until he scored. He was as consistent as he was magical; just look at the records.

His generation desegregated the major leagues. Robinson shoved open the door four years before Mays played his first game for the New York Giants, but the landscape remained treacherous for those brilliant ballplayers who followed him through.

Mays would never forget the vile epithets he heard from the stands in segregated Hagerstown, where he played his first game for the Class B Trenton Giants as a 19-year-old in 1950. After an 0-for-3 debut, he “worried that his poor showing reinforced the bigots’ view that he was unfit for this league,” biographer James S. Hirsch wrote.

The “Say Hey Kid” persona assigned to the young Mays by New York sportswriters — he played stickball with kids on city streets and lost his cap chasing fly balls — spoke to his zealous craft but ignored the complexities and occasional prickliness of the real man. And why wouldn’t Mays be mistrustful of the America that confronted him?

These stories we must remember and retell just as we remember and speak of “The Catch,” Mays’ over-the-shoulder grab and whipping throw against the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series.

I don’t usually go first person in this space, but that kid entranced by Mays’ 1956 Topps card still lives in me.

After the 1982 and 1983 Orioles lit the spark of my fandom, it was Mays whose story I gobbled up. How badly I wished I could travel back in time to watch him cover the endless outfield at the Polo Grounds or drive home runs through the chilly San Francisco mist. Instead, I learned the game and its history by reading about him, through picturing him in full flight.