Nationals and Orioles on opposite ends of the rebuilding curve

The tables have turned in the Beltway Series.

For the last five years, the Baltimore Orioles have been the worst team in baseball, and during that time, the Washington Nationals won a championship. The Beltway Series — or, rather, the MASN Rivalry — used to be a battle between one team trying to win and another team that wasn’t.

But this summer flipped the script. 

In the first full season of their rebuild, the Nationals have dropped into the cellar as the worst team in Major League Baseball. In case anyone was confused about their plan to enter the rebuild mode, they traded away 23-year-old superstar Juan Soto.

Meanwhile, the Orioles, expected to again be one of the league’s also-rans, suddenly turned into a good ball club. The franchise now has a shot at the postseason — a distant shot, but a shot nonetheless — for the first time since 2016. 

“We turned the corner this year,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. 

The Beltway Series that took place this week in the District — the Orioles won both games — offered a clear-cut juxtaposition of two franchises on opposite ends of rebuilds.

“You look at some of those guys and what they’ve been through over the last seven, eight, nine, 10 years and how they put their team together,” Nationals manager Dave Martinez told reporters Wednesday when asked about the Orioles’ successful retool. “I see some of our young guys and I think to myself this is gonna be good. We got some really good, young, talented players that are developing. The kids that are coming are going to be good.”

But that’s the difference between a team on the back end of a rebuild and one on the front end: the payoff. 

The Orioles, after years of 100-loss seasons, are now finally seeing potential on the big-league diamond. The Nationals, on the other hand, may be years away from any kind of a farm system payoff in the win-loss column.

“I really believe that we’re going to get there, especially with the young group that we’ve got,” Martinez said, per MASN. 

Arguably no skipper in the majors knows how to mentally navigate a rebuild better than Hyde. His first year in Baltimore was 2019 — one season after the club lost 115 games, tied for the third most in the live-ball era. His Orioles then lost 108 games in 2019 and 110 last season, with the COVID-19-shortened 2020 campaign sandwiched between. 

But now the Orioles are the surprise of the season thanks to a handful of players overperforming expectations and a couple of top prospects getting the call and playing like stars. Baltimore (75-67) is four games out of the final wild card spot, as of Thursday afternoon, with a crucial three-game series against the Blue Jays this weekend. 

The key to staying sane through a rebuild, Hyde said, is “patience.”

“You’re going to see things, really, that you haven’t seen in a while, and it’s going to be a lot of tough nights, just because you’re behind the 8-ball a little bit and you have mostly young players,” Hyde said Tuesday. “It just takes a lot of being able to try to be as consistent as possible and as positive as possible with your players.”

Hyde’s advice is some that he may have given Martinez this week. The two skippers are still close, Martinez said, after sharing a dugout on Joe Maddon’s coaching staff with the Chicago Cubs — a team that won the World Series in 2016. 

But Martinez also knows that patience only gets you so far. He has one year remaining on his contract, as does Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo, and the franchise could have a new owner soon if the Lerner family sells the club this summer.

“We want to win. We’ve got patience, but we want to win soon,” Martinez said. “We don’t want to wait eight, nine, 10 years. So we push the envelope a little bit with these guys. We really do. We’re trying to get them to understand the concept of winning and competing every day.”

Talking about getting out from underneath a rebuild is easier than actually accomplishing it, though. Some teams, like the Houston Astros, have turned their lowly clubs into perennial contenders, while others, like the Tigers, have struggled to turn things around after deciding to rebuild. 

There’s no guarantee that the Orioles’ success this season will translate into 2023, but Hyde believes his players have finally flipped that switch. 

“You start getting some confidence, guys start coming to the park a little bit differently,” said Hyde, whose club is 59-43 since calling up No. 1 prospect Adley Rutschman on May 21. 

“It’s not just about trying to survive in the big leagues, but now it’s about coming to the ballpark trying to win that night.”