Because it is a long enough regular season to test and re-test just about every variable, every team in baseball is going to have their wieners mangled in at least one game. Even the mighty zillion-dollar Los Angeles Dodgers recently had their tender bits forcibly run through a cheese grater by the Chicago Cubs. It happens! Still, it's hard not to feel a little bit uneasy about the suffering delivered to the Baltimore Orioles Sunday, at home, in the rubber match of a weekend series against the Cincinnati Reds. The O's put 41-year-old Charlie Morton on the mound to start the contest, and the Reds lifted him by his ankles and drowned him in a toilet, and then spent the rest of the game mercilessly bullying an increasingly ridiculous sequence of relief pitchers, rudely flaunting MLB's lack of a mercy rule, to the tune of a 24–2 final score.
Things didn't turn fully gruesome on Morton until the third inning, when Elly De La Cruz (who also made several eye-popping plays up the middle during the very brief period when this game could be described as "competitive") socked a high heater into the stands in right field to lead off what would soon become a "Baseball Bugs" conga line for the Reds. Minutes later, struggling with command, amassing a nightmarish pitch count, having already used a mound visit, and desperate for an out by any means, a sweaty and flustered Morton attempted a pickoff move to first, missed wide, and allowed an unearned run to scamper home, the fourth of the inning. Reds catcher Austin Wynns then punched a Morton 2–2 changeup into center field to drive home another run, and Orioles manager Brandon Hyde decided to put his bumbling pitcher to bed. Reliever Cody Poteet came on and hung a 3–2 slider to TJ Friedl, who socked it deep to right; Ryan O'Hearn, who is defensively out of position at every position but especially in right field, made a hilariously feeble effort to catch the ball on the warning track, and now the flood gates were not just open but entirely gone.
Maybe you are one of those crabs who waves away single-game or early-season statistical anomalies as of-interest only to goobers. Not me, brother: I am King Goober. Here's a good one: In a recent three-game series against the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies were held scoreless and produced a total of nine hits, only three of which went for extra bases. In Sunday's game, meanwhile, the Cincinnati Reds got five runs, 11 hits, four extra-base hits, and two dingers just from the last two batters in their lineup, Noelvi Marte and Wynns. Marte and Wynns drove in more runs together (13) than the Rockies and Washington Nationals scored total (nine) in the two legs of their Sunday doubleheader. The Reds scored more runs against the Orioles Sunday than they did in back-to-back recent series against the Giants and Pirates (23), and Cincinnati went 5–1 in those games. Not very long ago the Reds appeared to be one of the more offensively challenged teams in all of baseball, dropping four straight to the Rangers and Brewers by a combined score of 6–2, including a historic stretch of three straight 1–0 losses. Today they have the second-most prolific offense in the National League by total runs, and a better run differential than any team on the Junior Circuit. Thank you, Baltimore!
The Orioles, meanwhile, are stuck in the mud. Injuries have scrambled their pitching rotation, and their offense has not yet hit its stride. Their starters have the worst combined earned run average in the majors, per MLB, and their bullpen hasn't been much better, pitching to the league's fourth-highest WHIP. Morton in particular is having a very bad time to start his 18th season. He's been credited with a loss in each of his five starts, which could maybe be an unfair statistic except that Morton's earned run average after Sunday is a whopping 10.89. In 20.2 innings of work he's allowed a genuinely breathtaking 47 baserunners. Opposing hitters are slugging .591 against him. No part of his repertoire is working at all; thus, Morton's Statcast page is an expanse of blue to humble the Mediterranean Sea.
Command is a persistent problem: Morton is so infrequently working from ahead in the count that he cannot say with any confidence whether his pitches are any longer worth a damn. "If you gave me, I don’t know, if you said, 'We’ll give you 30 starts to get this right,' I’ll get it right," Morton said after the loss, per the Baltimore Banner. "It’s just, how much negatively do I affect the team during that process, right? That’s the question. Do I still think I can pitch well? Yeah. It’s just, some of the things that are going wrong right now, just throwing strikes. Making decent pitches consistently. Getting into a rhythm, some momentum. That’s the issue. But, yeah, I don’t doubt the fact I can get it right. It’s just, how quickly can I get it done?"
This is not generally something you want a starting pitcher to be probing a month into the season. The O's are in the miserable position of having to roll with Morton's struggles and throw it up to the heavens while they wait for other guys to get healthy enough to pitch. Zach Eflin and Grayson Rodriguez are both presently out, two of seven Baltimore pitchers on the injured list. Eflin, down with a lat injury, just resumed throwing last week, and is expected back in May; Rodriguez, meanwhile, is seeking second and third opinions on troublesome right shoulder inflammation, and is out indefinitely. The best the Orioles have in reserve is 37-year-old Kyle Gibson, who was signed to a minor-league contract late in spring training and is now working his way into game shape. The cavalry is not about to come racing over the hill, is what I am saying.
The Orioles lost their 2024 ace, Corbin Burnes, in free agency, and failed to replace him with anything approaching a front-line starter. Here I am required by law to note that Morton's one-year deal represents the only serious money spent by Baltimore's front office on starting pitching during the offseason. Even before assessing Morton's current capabilities, this was not a very inspiring commitment from the team's front office. Some damn good pitchers signed new contracts over the winter, in deals of various lengths and levels of commitment; the O's wind up looking awfully Mickey Mouse-ish rising and falling by the dependability and fading guile of a 41-year-old. Even at full strength, this was not a pitching staff that struck fear into the hearts of other contenders.
Now racked by injuries and suffering the worst start of Morton's career, the Orioles are just bad at pitching. Their starters have allowed opposing hitters to bat an ugly .312 and have the worst strikeout rate in baseball. Really only the pitching staff of those godawful Rockies can touch Baltimore's for measurable badness. As a consequence, the Orioles have won only a single series, and find themselves with ground to make up in an AL East that is as competitive as ever.
This is not to say that the Orioles are going to suck at pitching all season long. That's a good baseball team with lots of cool dudes; sooner or later they're going to start hitting the bejeezus out of the baseball and stringing together wins. But a 24–2 beatdown is as good a time as any to note that the Orioles lost an ace over the winter and replaced him with a mummy, and are having a terrible time pitching in a season that should sit in the middle of an era of full-bore World Series contention. No one is spared the occasional asteroid to the dick and balls, like the one Baltimore suffered Sunday, but given the shape of their pitching staff, the Orioles should invest in extra groin armor.
