Hey it’s Hannah here. Did you see the video out of a rain delay in D.C. over the weekend in which one of the members of the grounds crew was essentially run over by the unfurling tarp? Here, in case you didn’t:

Unfortunately for that guy, this is both tremendous content and the perfect excuse to promote a story I just had published at Front Office Sports about groundskeepers. The piece touches on some of the quotidian aspects of the career — like, 120-hour work weeks and email chains to complain about sunflower seeds and umpires — but primarily focuses on how the Tampa Bay Rays crew has been adjusting to groundskeeping in the elements after life in the dome.

At the Trop, instead of mowing the grass, they groom the artificial turf. Instead of feeding the outfield with fertilizer and water, they loosen it up with tines and use brushes to fluff the faux blades back up. And, always, they keep pace with the interminable stream of sunflower seeds spit out into the glorified carpet. A handheld vacuum and an especially light touch might work to clear the seeds sitting on the very top of the turf, but you don’t want to risk disturbing the coconut-based material underneath.

The variety of baseball playing fields and environs is such a special feature of the sport. And it’s not just domes and dimensions. According to the man who tended to Fenway for two and a half decades, the dark expanse of the Green Monster can make left field 40 degrees(!) warmer than home plate. Even as the actual action has tended towards boring efficiency, the athletes still have to contend with quirks of the different kinds of ballparks and weather. But those — at least the parks themselves — have become increasingly homogeneous over time, too. Frankly, I wish they were weirder!

A few years ago, I briefly started to report out a story about whether and how a team could engineer a ballpark to be so extreme that, if they built their roster to be especially tailored to however it played, they would have a meaningful home field advantage. The handful of execs I presented this to at the time resisted engaging too seriously with the hypothetical. I still want to pursue this line of inquiry, but since then the Orioles have made very public just how much they value having a park that plays as “neutral” — moving Camden Yards’ originally shallow left field wall out, only to decide they overcorrected and have to move it back in again. Around the time of the first move — pushing back the wall to make the park a little less homer-prone — I talked to Mike Elias. He said that having such a hitter-friendly park had made it difficult to attract free agent pitchers.

Perhaps, for his sake, they should have kept the cozier dimensions just to have a perpetual excuse.

Real quick, back to the topic of tarps. This didn’t end up in the final version of the story, but, in defense of the occasional grounds crew mishap that makes for a funny video, Rays head groundskeeper Mike Deubel said: “It's actually pretty dangerous. You grab a strap and you run. But the straps, don't wrap it around your hand, because if the wind picks up — generally in Florida you get a thunderstorm, you can get 45, 50 mile an hour winds — that tarp can take off, and if your hands wrapped around the strap, it's going to lift you up and slam you on the ground. So if that's the very first thing we always tell somebody, if the wind is whipping up that far, you just let it go for safety reasons. Just let the tarp go.”

In response to which Dan Moeller, the Rays director of special projects and field operations, offered this bit of wisdom: “As a veteran guy like myself, you always pull from the corners, because you don't want to be that guy that's buried underneath the tarp and gets to go viral.”

Thinking Fans, Feeling Fans: The suddenly struggling Orioles

by Zach Crizer

One of the things we’re most interested in at The Bandwagon is capturing the human condition of baseball. In a way distinct to sports, the broadest swath of humans affected is not a team, but its fans. Inspired by the Myers-Briggs personality test, I wanted to get a snapshot of a team by way of fans whose emotions are attached enough to that team to reflect something telling.

What do they think about the team? How do they feel? What judgments are they making? How do they perceive the team right now?

Nearing the end of April, perhaps no team is dealing with a more momentous personality crisis than the Baltimore Orioles. Rising from the ashes of an Astros-style controlled burn with Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson in the fold, these Orioles won 101 games and the AL East in 2023, then 91 games and a wild card in 2024, but have yet to notch a single victory in the postseason.

What recently charted like liftoff toward bigger, better things now seems more wobbly. The Orioles are off to a 10-17 start. Their postseason odds, per FanGraphs, have declined more than any other club’s since the start of the season, and now rank last in the AL East.

To get a sense of these Orioles, in a state of flux, I asked a few fans to weigh in: Scott Magness from the Bird’s Eye View podcast, notable O’s Twitter fan Jason Benowitz, and a friend of the ‘stack named Brandon, who is a lawyer from Maryland.

Thinking: Baltimore has, and had, a glaring issue that they declined to address: Pitching.

Having lost Corbin Burnes to free agency and replaced him with nothing of much note, they head into Monday with the worst team ERA in baseball (yes, even worse than the Rockies or Marlins).

“The pitching quality and depth were questionable before beginning spring training,” said Scott, the O’s podcaster. “They became abysmal with injuries to Zach Eflin and Grayson Rodriguez.”

Many an analyst could see the imbalance on the Orioles roster but accepted the logic. GM Mike Elias focused on collecting young hitters, in a pattern reminiscent of the curse-breaking Cubs rebuild. When the time came, those Cubs went out and paid Jon Lester to pair with reclamation project supernova Jake Arrieta. There was a sense that the Orioles, with Elias working under the new ownership of David Rubenstein, might attempt a market-adjusted version of that project.

“Most fans did not expect the Orioles to see the return of Corbin Burnes or Anthony Santander,” Scott said. “But there was an expectation that the Orioles would either sign or trade for starting pitching that may not be at the caliber of Burnes, [Blake] Snell, or [Max] Fried, but close enough.”

Instead, the Orioles did little to bolster the pitching staff, which Brandon called “a sad surprise.” They placed small but load-bearing bets on 41-year-old Charlie Morton and 35-year-old Japanese import Tomoyuki Sugano. Morton appears to be nearing the end of a long and distinguished career, with a 10.36 ERA. Sugano’s ERA looks relatively rosy, at 3.54, but nine strikeouts in 28 innings say he is going to struggle to maintain that.

Feeling: “The Orioles should be one of the best teams in all of baseball with no signs of stopping and unfortunately the reality is the opposite,” Jason said. “It cannot get much more deflating than that.”

Baltimore’s April has felt like nothing so much as the dregs of a team-sponsored Super Soaker dribbling out on your shoes. But it’s not just April. Jason said the mounting losses have been “the fruits of the non-labor” showing up.

Each fan mentioned Baltimore’s 24-2 loss to the Reds a week ago as a low point. Jason called it the straw that broke the camel’s back. Brandon can’t escape the feeling that the losses aren’t just piling up but getting worse.

“In the past few years, even when the Orioles would lose, the games seemed at least pretty competitive,” he said. “Now it seems like half the losses are blowouts.”

Judging: As advertised?

“I expect the offense to improve,” Scott said, citing Statcast expected metrics that do indeed paint a picture of a lineup whose surface stats are much worse than their at-bats and their quality of contact would imply.

Rutschman is just barely better than league average with the bat, with a 104 wRC+ that admittedly mirrors last season. But Henderson began the season on the IL and has slogged to a frustrating .220/.256/.378 thus far. Jordan Westburg’s line looks similar, and Colton Cowser is out with an injury.

“The franchise core has to be a top-five offense if this team is going to be a playoff-caliber team,” Scott said. “And since the second half of last year, they’ve looked more like a team going through the motions, without the hustle and spark they showed when they turned it around in 2023.”

Those downward trends aren’t likely to remain aligned, just as Cedric Mullins’ superstar show won’t continue to fly quite this high. Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs agree the Orioles are likely to play better than .500 ball the rest of the way. But in this moment, it can be hard to see the other side.

“Unfortunately,” Jason said, “I do feel the slow start is exactly what was advertised and is a sign of how this 2025 season will go.”

Perceiving: Every show feels like it could be one you’ve seen before.

“We've waited since (literally!) the 1990s to have owners willing to spend money,” Brandon said, recalling the doldrums of the Peter Angelos ownership. “We finally get owners willing to spend money ... and the offseason was just really boring. Can't keep acting like you're in a rebuild after the rebuild.”

The losing in Baltimore still casts a long shadow. It’s hard to avoid the reality that much of it was willful, purposeful on-field incompetence. Decisions from manager Brandon Hyde that once felt like player development savvy are now questioned for lacking urgency. Elias’s Astros pedigree is fading in comparison to a slow winter track record. If the obvious spark of excellence wasn’t enough to prompt an energetic reaction, every day treading water turns into a countdown. Gunnar Henderson starts to look like Manny Machado, and on and on.

It doesn’t have to be totally accurate to be totally salient.

“Orioles fans are always nervous about when the shoe will drop and the windows will close,” Scott said. “This fan base dealt with 14 consecutive losing seasons from 1998 to 2011. They saw some great seasons between 2012 and 2016 and then went for it again in 2018 before the wheels came off. That team went 8-20 to end April and promptly initiated a rebuild with Dan Duquette and Buck Showalter exiting by the end of the season.

“Fans are wondering if history may repeat itself.”

What we’re chatting about

• Roki Sasaki — who apparently inspired the Dodgers to install “eight state-of-the-art, multi-function, heated-seat, bidet-equipped Japanese-style toilets” by telling them in the offseason that it would make him more inclined to sign with the team — is correct. About bidets (truly, no downside for your downside!) and also about how you should ask for shit you want, you just might get it. I’m sure his teammates are enjoying what he did with his leverage. –HK
• Walk-off Little League home run is one of the more embarrassing ways I can think of to lose a major-league game. Or a Little League game, really, but we’ll let that slide. On the bright side, the Rangers’ misfortune allowed Luke Jackson, the pitcher who gave up the 2-foot chopper that turned into said walk-off, to say this: “It was quite literally Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events.” —ZC
• We’re one month into the 2025 season and Emmanuel Clase and Devin Williams — who had the first- and fourth-lowest ERA among relievers min. 20 innings in 2024 — have each surrendered more earned runs so far this year than all of last. I’m sure you can find plenty of analysis about why that might be and what their respective teams might do about it elsewhere. But I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the miserable seeming mental trap of being a big league closer. Whatever pressure to be pristine existed inherently in the role has now ramped up. Either they’ll continue to be tasked with pitching in the most precarious situations as a show of faith, or they’ll be demoted to something slightly less fraught and have to re-prove their perfection knowing the skepticism has already set in. There’s a common belief, routinely upheld, that relievers are volatile year to year. Past success doesn’t guarantee much. It’s hard for me to imagine that truism isn’t at least a little bit self fulfilling. –HK
• If you saw our Fan/Not A Fan video on Friday, we both ruled against a specific example of SNY’s ambitiously cinematic baseball — but with the caveat that often they do get it right and the attention to artistic visuals is admirable. So here’s an example of cinematic baseball done right by SNY, shared by the director of the broadcasts himself, who is a fantastic social media follow. —HK