It has been apparent for a while now that the 2016 season is going to come down to whether the Orioles can continue to do the one thing they have done consistently all year.
Win at home.
The O's had the best home record in the majors for a big chunk of the season and still have the fourth best among the 30 big league teams as they look ahead to their final homestand of the season — an 11-game stretch that includes a lot of winnable games and a critical four-game series against the first-place Red Sox.
It begins on Thursday night with the first of four games against the last-place Tampa Bay Rays and ends with three against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team with baseball's third-worst record.
We'll find out tonight in the rubber match of a three-game series in Boston just how much ground the Orioles will have to make up to make a run at the American League East title. It would certainly help if Kevin Gausman can stand up to the hot-hitting Sox and 20-game-winner Rick Porcello, but the long weekend will have a lot to say about the way the final two weeks of the season play out.
The Red Sox will be at home for four games against the resilient Yankees, so the scoreboard watching at Camden Yards will be intense.
Of course, if you've been paying attention to the way this Orioles team has gotten to this point in the season, you know that it's not really going to be about what the Red Sox do against the Yankees or what the Blue Jays do against the Angels on a strangely scheduled West Coast trip that also takes them to Seattle next week.
The Orioles have shown throughout the season that they either do the things they do best and win or mysteriously stop doing those things and experience short bursts of total frustration. They have been uncharacteristically streaky — for a Buck Showalter team — this year, with three seven-game winning streaks and another 8-1 run to go with four losing streaks of either four or five games.
The good news is that they were solid in all three phases of the game on the first two stops of the current road trip and won each of the first two series to keep the three-team race for the division standings tight.
Monday night's lopsided loss to the Red Sox was disappointing but not unexpected, considering that the Orioles sent struggling left-hander Wade Miley to the mound against Boston ace David Price at a time when Price is pitching as well as he ever has in his storied career. Miley collapsed immediately and Price gave up two hits over eight innings for a personal-best seventh victory in his last seven starts, so it wasn't exactly a missed opportunity.
And the Orioles made up for it when Dylan Bundy got the better of Red Sox midseason acquisition Drew Pomeranz.
While tonight's game in Boston is important, what it will require to overtake the Red Sox is fairly obvious. The Orioles will need to take full advantage of this well-placed 11-game homestand and send all those irritating Red Sox fans home without their supper next week.
Obviously, that doesn't mean winning all 11 games, but it does mean winning all three series. If they can't win the series against the cellar-dwelling Rays and the Diamondbacks, then they've answered their own question. But it will be their performance head-to-head against the Red Sox that likely will decide whether they still have a real chance at the division title when they head out for their season-ending six-game road trip to Toronto and New York.
If they can go at least 7-4 on the homestand, they should solidify their position as — at least — one of the two AL wild card teams. If they can roll over the Rays and win three of four against the Red Sox, they will have a real shot at the division title with the Jays and Sox going head-to-head on the final weekend of the regular season.
Count your blessings. If you listened to the so-called experts last spring, the Orioles were supposed to be playing the spoiler by now.
Read more from columnist Peter Schmuck on his blog, "The Schmuck Stops Here," at baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog and follow him @Schmuckstop on Twitter.