The Orioles remained in a rut with a pair of series losses to the Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox in which they scored just 14 runs over six games. Here are five things we learned from another uneven week in which the Orioles and Yankees were unable to shake one another at the top of the American League East:

Wednesday’s loss in Boston summed up what has ailed this Orioles team for months: Keegan Akin could have, in retrospect should have, walked Tyler O’Neill given O’Neill’s .760 slugging percentage against left-handers. The Orioles didn’t want to move the winning run to second base with one out in the bottom of the 10th. Fair enough. But Akin could not, under any circumstances, give O’Neill a pitch to drive. He did just that with an 88 mph slider that caught way too much of the plate and ended up soaring over the Green Monster.

“Just made a bad pitch,” Akin said. “Paid the price for it.”

We could turn this into another discourse on the Orioles’ unreliable bullpen and manager Brandon Hyde’s handling of it, but that’s not really the point. Akin’s juicy slider was just the last in a cascading series of lapses that cost the club another close game.

Colton Cowser tripled with one out in the second inning. The next two hitters, Austin Slater and Jackson Holliday, struck out swinging on a combined nine pitches. Gunnar Henderson doubled and advanced to third on a wild pitch with two outs in the fifth. Cedric Mullins swung through a 2-2 fastball. Those lost at-bats were part of the Orioles’ 1-for-6 performance with runners in scoring position. Their two runs in the first nine innings came on solo homers, perhaps the only thing this offense still does consistently well.

And let’s not forget the defense. Third baseman Emmanuel Rivera’s wayward throw in the third gave the Red Sox their first run of the night. Holliday took a step back and let a hard ground ball eat him up in the 10th, a miscue that didn’t lead directly to defeat but made it more difficult to pitch around O’Neill. We thought infield defense would be a strength for this team. Instead, the Orioles have been below average by most metrics.

Sloppy glove work, empty plate appearances and a poor relief outing wasted another very good start from Dean Kremer, whose performance in the wake of taking a scary line drive off his arm has felt like a minor miracle. The Orioles are an unsteady machine with parts that don’t work together for more than one or two nights in a row. They’ve been this way since the middle of June. Every hint they might be turning a corner is followed by a deflating step back.

We listen to Hyde talk, and he feels like he’s trying everything — days off, lineup tweaks, you name it — to break this cycle of frustration, to no avail.

We hear the players, obviously baffled by their inability to regain the form that carried them to 101 wins last season and to the best record in baseball through the first 2 1/2 months of this one. With 15 games left until the postseason, they’re running short on time, and they know it.

“That’s a question for the higher-ups, the guys who make the decisions of who plays, who doesn’t play and all that stuff,” Kremer said Wednesday when asked why the Orioles can’t get going. “So, I wish I could tell you but I got no answer for that.”

Concerns over Adley Rutschman reached a new peak. He answered with his best at-bat in months. The undercurrent of anxiety around Rutschman’s performance burst into a full geyser last week as the All-Star catcher and Hyde faced pointed questions about the state of Adley.

That’s to be expected when the cornerstone of your club’s renaissance hits .188 with nine extra-base hits from the beginning of July through the first week of September. Manager and star seemed equally bereft of explanations, saying only that Rutschman is not playing through an injury.

“He’s playing really frustrated,” Hyde said Sunday.

“I think focusing on this playoff run and what we’re trying to do here is the most important thing right now,” Rutschman said, deflecting the conversation to team concerns.

In an earlier interview, he told The Baltimore Banner he’s trying to stay upbeat as he reviews each component of his swing and each swing decision. “Riding the wave,” as he put it.

He upped his aggression early in the season, trading on-base percentage for harder contact, but that formula has eluded him in the second half. You get the sense he’s really not sure why this is happening, and that has to be at least a little frightening for an athlete who’s never failed for long at any level.

Just when Rutschman’s night seemed darkest, however, a bit of light crept in at Fenway Park.

In the Orioles’ 12-3 loss Monday, he hit three balls at least 98 mph, with two hits to show for it. The next night, he came up in a clutch situation — bases loaded and two out with the Orioles leading 3-1 in the top of the seventh. He fell behind 1-2, then took two outside fastballs. When Red Sox reliever Luis Guerrero tried to catch him off-balance with a 3-2 changeup, he poked a two-run single to left, runs that would end up giving the Orioles their winning margin.

It was a disciplined, professional at-bat, and in some ways, that inspired more confidence than if Rutschman had sold out to crush a fly ball.

It’s a fool’s game pretending to know when such a moment might portend a turn in a player’s performance. Baseball is rarely so simple. But Rutschman needed a good day.

If the Orioles are overly dependent on home runs, at least they have Anthony Santander: When Santander became the first switch-hitter in 18 years to reach 40 home runs in a season, he gave us a sweet round-number occasion to appreciate all he has done to keep the Orioles afloat.

So often — as was the case in the club’s 12-3 and 5-3 losses in Boston — his home runs have been the only shining lights in moribund offensive performances. Even when his batting average slipped to .198 in August, 13 of his 21 hits went for extra bases and eight went over the fence.

Santander is the perfect avatar for an Orioles offense that would be better if it ranked higher than fifth in the American League in on-base percentage but still gets the job done thanks to an AL-best .438 slugging percentage. He whiffs a lot, parlays his power into only a modest walk rate but gets the barrel of his bat on the pitches he does hit and elevates them. He’s not an elegant outfielder, but he makes tough catches and has plenty of arm strength for right field.

The Orioles swiped him from Cleveland as a Rule 5 draft pick in 2016, when he had yet to play above Single-A, and he has made himself a fixture of the club’s rise from the ashes. On the list of memorable Orioles switch-hitters, he’ll never pass Eddie Murray, but Murray never hit more than 33 home runs in a season.

With so many gifted hitters pressing their way up from the minor leagues, the Orioles will face a difficult decision when Santander hits free agency after this season. If they decide their money is better spent elsewhere, it won’t be pleasant saying farewell to this classy gentleman and monument to self-improvement.

In a drab week, the rotation was no longer the problem: Pitching injuries upended the Orioles’ roster plans and depressed their winning percentage. With the postseason drawing near, however, the starting rotation is pointed in the right direction.

Kremer and Albert Suárez continued to make strong cases to start playoff games with quality outings in Boston. Zach Eflin gave up a pair of home runs in falling to his former team last weekend but has lost none of his impeccable control since returning from right shoulder inflammation. Most importantly, Corbin Burnes has strung together two non-disastrous September starts after he posted a 7.36 ERA in August.

The last major piece of the puzzle, Grayson Rodriguez, has resumed throwing off a mound. He says he’s feeling good, and pitching coach Drew French said he’s hopeful the powerful right-hander will be available for October starts. There’s an obvious time crunch given how few regular-season games remain and how few minor league rehabilitation dates are still available.

Would the Orioles throw their No. 2 starters directly into playoff action with hardly any ramp-up? Difficult to say, but they might not have to with Suárez and Kremer consistently keeping them in games.

Is this the dream rotation they envisioned for October, with Burnes, Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish giving opposing hitters no day to exhale? No.

Is it a workable group with a higher upside than last year’s postseason rotation if Rodriguez continues to progress? Yes.

Hope, thy name is Samuel Basallo: It’s not as if the Orioles are scraping the bottom of their prospect barrel, but this has been a season for promotions, with most of their top young hitters either claiming regular jobs in Baltimore or at least tasting the big leagues. This is how it’s supposed to work. The farm doesn’t stay overstuffed; its stores diminish as the big league club grows stronger.

Basallo, the catcher from the Dominican Republic who just reached Triple-A Norfolk 12 days after his 20th birthday, is the one remaining Orioles minor leaguer whose impending arrival will inspire a countdown.

He showed why last weekend when he drove a ball 455 feet — exit velocity 109.6 mph — over the scoreboard and into the Norfolk night. Freaky stuff from a player who vaulted to No. 10 in MLB Pipeline’s prospect ranking because of his precocious power.

There were those fans who wanted the Orioles to dangle Basallo as the centerpiece of a trade deadline blockbuster. There are others who speak of trading Rutschman to clear space for a guy who won’t be allowed to drink a beer legally until this time next year.

Back here in reality, the Orioles are neither going to trade one of the most exciting hitters in the minors nor shove a former No. 1 prospect aside because he’s slumped for the past two months. Basallo, when he’s ready next season, will be additive, whether he’s sharing catcher at-bats with Rutschman or shoving into the designated hitter picture.

One of Mike Elias’ most pressing initiatives when he took over baseball operations was to make the Orioles a legitimate competitor for top Dominican talent. Basallo is the most exciting fruit from that quest, so his arrival in Baltimore will carry symbolic weight beyond the home runs he sends soaring toward the B&O Warehouse.

Those will be fun, too.