Is it possible instead to allocate a portion of the reward to " a # of
runner up(s)" even though the runner-up(s) block will be orphaned?

There's really no concept of a "runner up" because hashing is progress free. It's unintuitive and often trips people up. There's no concept that everyone is 95% of the way to finding a solution and then someone pips you to the post. It's more like playing the lottery over and over again. Doesn't matter how many times you did it before, the next time your chances are the same.

A better concept is of rewarding "near miss" solutions which is what we already do of course, via pools, which pay you for shares which don't quite meet the difficulty target but almost do. So the question is how can we implement pools which have this reward structure (which obviously works well) without miners simultaneously giving up their right to block creation either due to technical problems or sheer lazyness.