Pose the question to anyone in an Orioles uniform, and the pause before he speaks is pregnant. The sigh is audible, the stare far away. The question is almost as loaded as the possible answers _ and there's no one answer.
Danny Valencia stood silent for 30 seconds, gathering his thoughts. Adam Jones answered for four minutes, uninterrupted, and said he could have gone on for two hours.
As they near the halfway point at a 112-loss pace, on track for one of the worst seasons in major-league history, the Orioles players who created this reality have already had plenty of time to take stock of the simple question that couldn't change much when the moment arrived to answer it: How did this happen?
"It's hard to fathom how a team with this much talent hasn't played _ well, has played as poorly as we have and gotten results as poorly as we have," reliever Darren O'Day said. "I wish I could figure it out. I don't know. I really don't."
"We just got into a funk, and it kept going and going," shortstop Manny Machado said. "Honestly, I don't even know when it started. It's just been the whole thing. It's been the whole run."
The baseball reasons have been tread over time and again. Injuries forced depth players into prominent roles to replace the likes of Zach Britton, Mark Trumbo, Jonathan Schoop, Tim Beckham, Colby Rasmus and O'Day for long stretches. Chris Davis, one of the lineup's centerpieces, is on pace for one of the worst season's in baseball history, and the two productive young hitters who carried the load in 2017 _ Schoop and Trey Mancini _ haven't repeated that. The starting rotation, while improved, has taken months to shake itself out, and the bullpen never found a groove without Britton.
But the Orioles rode a good feeling as much as they did talent through the five seasons at .500 or better beginning in 2012, and to lose frequently and continuously into the halfway point of 2018 takes more than just stats into play.
This year's Orioles have had everything go wrong that possibly could, and a combination of uncertainty about individuals' and the club's future with every player's own efforts to correct things on his own left the team out of the playoff picture a month into the season. Their good times were fleeting, and worst of all, they didn't know they should have enjoyed it.
"You play almost every day, and it can get on you in a hurry," Opening Day starter Dylan Bundy said. "That's what happened, I feel like. We lost a few games early _ a lot of games early _ and it kind of ended up where we are now."
