Fresh off a bit of a disappointing series against the Padres and continuing a west coast road trip that's gone poorly for their offense, the Orioles head to face the worst-in-MLB Athletics. Mark takes a look at the remaining schedule for the O's vs. what's left for the Rays to see who's got a tougher road coming. The Rays losing Shane McClanahan could benefit the O's, but only if the O's play well enough to take advantage. Even the cupcake Athletics are showing improvement in the second half, so the O's can't just sleep on them.

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The Orioles lost a stinker on Tuesday night, with trade deadline starter Jack Flaherty contributing significantly to the smell. Mark tries to find some things to be happy about in spite of that, since the team does still have a three game AL East lead. This effort includes looking at the team's #1 ranking on a recent farm system update. Do the Orioles still deserve to be that high? That probably depends on your thoughts on Colton Cowser and/or Heston Kjerstad. Other outlets disagree, so hopefully this one proves to be correct. In the back half of the show, Mark looks at how recent attempts by Mike Elias to reinforce the Orioles pitching staff with trades or signings have, uh, generated initially lackluster results, and hopes that this changes some time soon so the O's don't have an anchor to slow down their new winning ways.

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CEDRIC MULLINS! Need Mark say more? No, but it wouldn't be a very good podcast if he left it there. Mark unleashes his exuberance about the Orioles finding a way to win two out of three against the Mariners even with Seattle packing its stadium to celebrate Félix Hernández going into the M's team HOF. They could have easily lost all three of those games and they won two. Great teams find a way to do it and the O's did. Plus, looking ahead to the disappointing Padres and what's been going on with them.

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If Félix Bautista had blown ANOTHER save on Thursday, things would be feeling pretty dire for Orioles fans, but he didn't and now the Orioles have a three game lead and a magic number of 44 with 47 games to play. On Mark's mind is what went wrong against Houston, what can hopefully start going better in the near future, and just trying to enjoy this ride because it's so unexpected and fun and it's important not to lose sight of that even after a stupid loss. Also, a quick overview of the just-updated top Orioles prospect list on MLB Pipeline, and a look ahead to this week's opponent, the Seattle Mariners.

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Mark was all ready to come back from Hawaii and talk about how awesome things have been going with the Orioles lately, except then on Monday there were reports that MASN's Kevin Brown is suspended for saying "too negative" stuff about the O's that wasn't even that negative. After running through what's becoming a cause celebre in baseball media, Mark moves on to another Angelos-involved bit of pettiness in not treating Mike Mussina like the franchise great that he is. From the mailbag, a listener gets Mark talking about the Jack Flaherty trade, which he's happy with so far.

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The old days of Deadspin started the trend of Remembering Some Guys. Mark is on vacation right now and recorded this one in advance where listeners from the show helped Remember Some Orioles Games. Most of us understandably have happy memories from 2012 and 2014 but there are a variety of random memories including a game where Cal was caught stealing twice, a 17-inning loss, a César Izturis walkoff, and more. Thank you to everyone who wrote in and shared a story.

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The easiest way to have the talent pipeline that Mike Elias always talked about building was always going to be to nail the team's picks when it was drafting in the top five spots. Mark looks back through the 2019-2022 Orioles draft classes to see how things are going for them, finding that the first rounders have been working out even when the O's surprised people, and their second round hit rate is looking good too. What will that amount to going forward? None of us can say for sure, but things feel promising for now.

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Every bad Orioles team since 2019 was made worse by Mike Elias trading away veteran players for prospects. The 2022 team that turned out to be decent also had veterans swapped for prospects. Mark looks back on the results from these tanking-oriented trades to see how much of a difference this group is making on the better Orioles of 2023 and how much the deals could still impact the O's of the near future. He's done better than Dan Duquette, to no one's surprise.

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It's been five years since the Orioles traded everybody that wasn't nailed down and netted a bunch of prospects who former GM Dan Duquette wanted us all to believe would contribute to the next good Orioles team. Mark looks back on the point where the rebuild kicked off to think about whether it could have gone differently if players were traded sooner, what other deals the O's might have made, and what's left from those July 2018 deals. Spoiler: It's not much.

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One out away from closing out a game against the Phillies, the Orioles and Yennier Cano couldn't finish the job and they ended up with a walkoff loss to fall back to a 1.5 game division lead. Mark takes note of some concerning trends in Cano's performance lately and hopes that the O's can figure out what to do about it. Also down bad lately is Jorge Mateo, and quietly so is Austin Hays. The trade deadline is six days away and we're going to find out what prospects they use to improve the stuff that can be improved. The unheralded prospect is Deivy Cruz, and the revisited prospect is Jud Fabian.

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