As spring training began six months that felt like six years ago, one thing that “everyone” knew about the coming baseball season is that the Orioles would be very bad. The reason for this near-universal belief was a simple one: The Orioles were bad in 2019 and over the offseason only acted in ways that, on paper, made them even worse. It’s a good way to have everyone expect that you will end up in last place.
In the early days of spring training, before anyone had any reason to think there would be anything weird about the 2020 baseball season, the Orioles had a 0.