You know what else was bad? The Orioles got only four hits.
Something is rotten with the Baltimore Orioles roster. What that is, who is to blame for it, and how to fix it, are questions that seemingly become more urgent with every passing clunker. Thursday night’s series finale against the Dodgers offered another one of those games where every sign points towards the inescapable conclusion that this thing ain’t working. The Orioles lost, 6-3.
It should not have been this way. It didn’t have to be. The Dodgers starting pitcher, Bobby Miller, brought an ERA north of 7, and a WAR of -1.0, into the contest, having accumulated that large positive and separately large negative across nine starts to date. Batters were hitting .313 against him, and slugging .563. He has allowed a .973 OPS in innings 1-3 and an .883 OPS in innings 4-6.
The Orioles were not equal to the task of making Miller look like that pitcher, even if they were fortunate to turn one Colton Cowser swing into three runs. They did not get a hit until the fourth inning. Cowser’s fifth inning homer was just the second hit of the game. I mean, honestly. What is that, even? The increasing regularity with which this kind of outcome is occurring is distressing for anyone who wants to believe this team has any hope of October success.
With the benefit of Cowser’s 20th home run of the season, all that they really would have needed for the night from starting pitcher Cade Povich is something in the vicinity of acceptable. Povich has had occasions of being this guy, with a fun joke about an alter ego named “Slim” who, in essence, is good at pitching. Slim did not make it on the flight to Los Angeles.
This was a familiar outing to those who’ve watched Povich’s starts to date. He can manage to navigate his way into a two-strike count with some success. Getting the out once he gets to two strikes is proving more elusive. Consider: League-wide, in a two-strike count, batters are hitting just .169 with a .511 OPS. Povich came into Thursday’s game allowing a .266 average and .793 OPS in the same situations.
It’s a rough split. It got rougher over the first three innings of the game, with Povich giving up four two-strike hits and seeing his pitch count balloon because even a number of the outs that he recorded were lengthy at-bats. A pair of two-strike hits in the second inning scored the first Dodgers run, and they threatened further in the third with two more two-strike hits.
Even so, it was a mere 1-0 deficit heading into the fourth inning. From that point, it wasn’t two-strike counts that were giving Povich problems, it was the Dodgers, with the benefit of having seen him once or twice already in the game, sitting on pitches that they could do damage on.
I don’t mean home run damage. Povich didn’t give up any dingers. But he did manage to give up ten hits, including three straight hits to the 7-8-9 hitters to begin the fourth inning, and four hits in that inning overall before manager Brandon Hyde had no choice but to bring out the hook with 87 pitches thrown by his rookie pitcher.
87 pitches to get ten outs! This was the best pitching prospect the Orioles had going for them going into the season, and he’s the only one of the preseason O’s pitching prospects who had any kind of success at the Triple-A level this year. (Brandon Young fans, I hear you, and you’re right: He’s been doing well at Norfolk, but he wasn’t on the radar in March.) Povich has a 6.58 ERA after allowing five runs in this game. It’s not great.
That fifth run came in after Povich left the game. Burch Smith inherited runners on the corners and at this point the Orioles defense, not having gotten to participate in the failure up to that point, decided to get in on the act.
The runner on first base, Enrique Hernández, attempted to steal second base. He was such a dead duck that he was able to start a rundown when Adley Rutschman’s throw beat him by a mile. Those who have been closely observing the Orioles these disappointing months have seen them blow this exact play such that the runner on third scored while failing to get out the guy in the rundown either.
Jackson Holliday chased the runner back towards first while looking to make sure the guy on third didn’t get any ideas. The guy didn’t get any ideas. Then, when the time came to actually make the throw to first to get the guy out, Ryan O’Hearn didn’t catch the ball. MASN replays showed that the throw may have actually hit the runner. Initially, an error was charged to O’Hearn, though the error was removed by the scorer later.
Not the most embarrassing failure, in that the runner ended up back on first base and no run scored. Just one problem: The inning could have been over and it wasn’t. The batter at the plate during all of this, Miguel Rojas, poked a floating liner to the opposite field, over the whole infield and well short of the whole outfield, the kind of perfectly placed lucky shot that it only feels like the Orioles haven’t gotten in months. That was the fifth Dodgers run.
Miller finally ran into trouble, mostly trouble of his own making, in the fifth inning. He started off the inning by hitting Eloy Jiménez with a pitch. After Cedric Mullins grounded into a forceout, Ramón Urías drew a walk. Two men on base? Sometimes, that can be the start of a rally. Not many of those times have happened in the last month and a half, if not the last two and a half. One batter later, Cowser made it a rally after all, blasting off over the fence in left-center field.
It only felt like the Orioles were losing worse than 5-3 at this point if you’ve been watching too much Orioles lately. Too much Orioles like in the seventh inning, when they managed to load the bases with two outs after Holliday picked up a single (just the fourth O’s hit of the game) and Cowser and Rutschman followed with walks. This brought up Gunnar Henderson. The Dodgers yanked the ineffective Daniel Hudson in favor of Blake Treinen – another righty – to face Henderson.
Two pitches into the at-bat, Henderson had a 2-0 count. Good things often happen for batters after 2-0 counts. Treinen threw a 90mph cutter not far off the middle of the plate. Henderson was taking all the way. Then a 2-1 fastball, bottom/inner third. Henderson did not offer at the pitch. He started swinging then, fouling off two pitches out of the zone before striking out swinging on a third pitch out of the zone. Ouch.
Eventually, Matt Bowman being pushed into a second inning out of desperation loaded up the bases. The Orioles changed to Keegan Akin to try to get the last two outs of the eighth. Akin gave up a deep fly ball to score a sixth Dodgers run, then got a popout to end the inning.
Did the Orioles get another batter on base in the rest of the game after that Henderson whiff? Yes, actually. I was surprised too. Mullins was hit by a pitch by former Oriole Evan Phillips to lead off the ninth inning. No one got on base after that. It was not a fun game, overall. Half of the games have not been fun since June 8. The Orioles went 1-7 with runners in scoring position in this contest. It’s also hard to win when you only get four hits.
The Orioles fell to 1.5 games back of the Yankees with the loss. They’re 7.5 up on the Red Sox (with the tiebreaker on top) for making any postseason spot at all. They are heading a bit closer back east now to Colorado for a weekend set against the Rockies. If they don’t show some more signs of life against a bad team, things are going to seem even more dire. Albert Suárez is set to start the 8:40 Eastern opener for the O’s, with Austin Gomber pitching for the Rockies.