Brandon Hyde is one of the few in the Orioles’ dugout with postseason experience.
“It’s totally different,” the former Chicago Cubs assistant and current Orioles manager said. “You’ve got serious adrenaline going.”
The upcoming series against the Tampa Bay Rays — the Orioles’ most consequential in years — will feel as close to playoff baseball as perhaps any in the regular season can.
The fate of the American League East is in the balance, and the way the four games at Camden Yards play out will have an outsized impact on determining who will claim the top spot by season’s end. Baltimore owns a two-game lead over Tampa Bay ahead of Thursday’s opener with the potential of clinching its first playoff berth since 2016 as early as Friday.
Outfielder Austin Hays, one of several veterans who braved the club’s painful rebuild, said the Orioles have done well at focusing on their games rather than how the Rays are playing or the . But they are, of course, aware of the series’ stakes, and he believes they’re prepared to meet the moment.
“The games count for twice as much,” Hays said. “You look at the games back and you know the head-to-head counts twice as much. With that being said, you can’t go out there and try to swing twice as hard, throw twice as hard or make twice as much happen. You just continue to do what you did to be in first place at this part of the season.”
After Wednesday night’s , Baltimore’s magic number to clinch a playoff berth is four — meaning a 95-win Orioles team cannot miss the postseason — while that figure to secure their first AL East title since 2014 is 15.
The range of outcomes for the series include the Orioles going into the penultimate week of the season with a six-game lead and a magic number of six if they sweep. However, if the Rays win all four games, they would reclaim the division’s top spot by two games. A wrinkle to the series that benefits Baltimore is it enters with a 6-3 record against the Rays, meaning one win this weekend will give the Orioles the tiebreaker over Tampa Bay and drop their magic number that night by three.
“I know that it’s going to be a big series, and it’s a team we know very well,” Hyde said. “It’s going to be exciting for the fans, and we’re looking forward to it. We’ve obviously come a long way to play in these type of games in mid-September against a team that’s a really, really good club. I want our guys to enjoy it, honestly.”
Hays and most of his teammates haven’t participated in a series as important as this one. The Orioles were MLB’s worst team from 2018 to 2021, and while they competed for a wild-card spot last season, owning a tight division lead is different than having a small chance of making a September run.
This weekend’s series is the franchise’s most pivotal in the regular season in at least seven years — and perhaps much longer.
The last time the Orioles faced off with an AL East team in September with the division’s top spot on the line was in 2016, the last season they made the postseason. The only other two seasons in the wild-card era (since 1995) that Baltimore has played in such a series were 1996 and 2012.
In 2016, Baltimore entered a four-game set against Boston on Sept. 19 three games behind the Red Sox, but the Orioles were swept to fall out of AL East contention. Their most important series before that was the 2014 AL Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals when the Orioles were also swept. In 2014, the last time Baltimore won the AL East, the club held a division lead of between 8 1/2 and 14 1/2 games the entire last month of the season.
While this weekend and the postseason to follow are uncharted waters for these Orioles, Hyde believes they’re battle-tested to withstand the increased pressure.
“I think last year, we played postseason-type of games late,” he said. “There’s going to be intensity to the games, and there’s been intensity to other games we’ve played also. But everybody understands the standings and where we are from the finish line, and we’ve got to play really well.”
Several times this year, Orioles players who have never played in the postseason have remarked that a game or series has felt what they imagine a playoff atmosphere would be like. The first came in early May in front of sold-out crowds in Atlanta against the National League-best Braves. Later that month, they swept the Toronto Blue Jays for one of their most impressive series of the season. In July, they won three of four against Tampa Bay — the biggest series of the season before the upcoming one — and took two of three against the New York Yankees at Camden Yards in front of crowds the ballpark hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.
Hays expects this weekend to be an even greater atmosphere than those.
“I expect there to be a good crowd, it’s weekend games against a team that’s nipping at our heels for the top of the division,” Hays said. “I’m sure it’s going to be an electric atmosphere. We’re going to be in our home ballpark, so I imagine we’ll feed off that. That’s going to be a tough environment for an opposing team to come and play in.”
Rays at Orioles
Thursday, 7:15 p.m.
TV: Chs. 45, 5
Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM
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