The Sunday afternoon Orioles game thread: vs. Angels, 1:35

Newton's First Law of Baseball tells us that a team that sucks will continue to suck unless acted upon by an outside force. The Orioles are playing some bad baseball lately. Players who should be playing better, aren't, for reasons unknown to me. Why are players like Steve Pearce, Chris Davis, and Alejandro De Aza doing so poorly at the plate? Why is the once-sure-handed Manny Machado now looking like a butcher in the field?

I have absolutely no idea. Maybe the Orioles know. Fixing problems is not so easy as identifying them. In any case, it's going to be heavily in the hands of Mike Wright, making his MLB debut in starting today's game, to arrest the slide, at least for one day. No pressure or anything. You've only got to face Mike Trout and friends. If he's able to hold his own, that will be a great moment for him, and hopefully also for the Orioles, because you might have noticed they aren't scoring much.

They probably won't score much today either, because they're going up against Garrett Richards, who had a 2.61 ERA last year and an even lower one so far this year. Well, stranger things have happened.