The Orioles Ruined My Easter And Were Embarrassed By The Reds, 24-2, As Their Pitching Continues To Make Me Want To Eat Glass
You know shit has hit the fan in a game when a position player comes in, but when you have 2 position players pitching for the same team it's a grade A disaster. The Orioles put up one of the worst loses in franchise history and easily the most embarrassing loss in recent memory as they lost 24-2 to the Reds on Easter Sunday in front of a good home crowd. Anytime you get a 20 spot hung on you it's bad, when you're losing by 22 runs it's gotta be close to rock bottom. I've seen them lose 30-3, I've seen the Mothers Day Massacre in Boston, I've seen postseason sweeps and this loss is up there with any of them. No one ever wants to get their ass kicked on Easter, that just can't happen. But it does happen when you trot out god damn 41 year-old Charlie Morton. Morton and his 10.89 ERA signed a $15 million deal this offseason and that sentence right there shows you exactly why this season is going the way it's going. The fact that they signed Charlie Morton to assume a role in this rotation of a team that was trying to win a World Series. What does that tell you? They're 9-12 and have the worst ERA in baseball, how and why was this not better addressed in the off-season? The best was how on Saturday night after using 7 guys to get the win, Hyde said how bad they needed a good outing from Morton and needed him to go deep. He got seven outs. Seven. The same amount of runs he surrendered. Couldn't have asked for a worse start when the team needed someone to step up.
Everyone and their mother knew the Orioles needed to add legit arms to the rotation and it was pretty much ignored. Maybe it wasn't spending all that money and seven years for Max Fried, but maybe it's going harder at Garrett Crochet who has been incredible for Boston. Maybe it's pushing harder for Dylan Cease or Michael King, maybe it's trying to talk with Miami about Sandy. I liked the Tomoyuki Sugano signing but the Morton one never made an ounce of sense. And yes, they've got an insane amount of pitching injuries already, the move to not attack the pitching market more aggressively has this team trying to tread water and April isn't even over yet.I didn't think the rotation was going to be good, I thought it would be about average, but Morton has just dragged it down to damn much. The offense has it's struggles too but my god is it tough to come back down from 4-0 in the third every night when the starter pisses down his leg and you're already into a tired bullpen. The bats right now either go crazy and score 7-8 or they score 0-1. Gunnar missed a month of Spring, Adley has been incredibly unlucky, Westburg stuck in a slump but breaking out, not having Colton Cowser, things will improve for the bats. Shoutout the bullpen though, I believe it was a top 3 ERA in baseball until yesterday's explosion, at least those guys are showing up (Not Perez). There is just no way you can ever expect to compete in the AL East with a rotation ERA of 6.11. You just can't. Just a quick look at the rotation and their ERA (Eflin 3.00 ERA on IL, plz come back soon!).
-Tomoyuki Sugano -3.43
- Cade Povich - 6.38
- Dean Kremer -6.41
-Brandon Young - 6.75 (1 start)
-Charlie Morton -10.89
And I understand the "it's still early" crowd, not even 20 games in so you're right. But it doesn't look good right now with this crew as it's currently standing. They've got to find something to do with Morton, I get he's 41 and making $15 million but he can't make another start for this team. He just can't. They need to tell him "We're either going to move you to the bullpen and avoid using you for a little or putting you on the IL with a shoulder strain." Or you have him hit the road and eat the $15 mill, it's not my money so what the hell? But you can't really have 2 unusable guys in the bullpen either, so you'd basically be two guys down in an already tired pen. Do you eat the money and DFA him and run out Brandon Young until Eflin comes back? Might as well, good chance that he doesn't pitch to a 10 ERA. Eventually you'll get Zach Eflin, Tyler Wells, Kyle Bradish, and hopefully Grayson Rodriguez, but it's impossible to count on any pitchers coming back and being close to their old selfs, it would be foolish to do that. Kyle Gibson working his way back up in the minors but outside of that, that's pretty much it for pitching help. Unless you make a trade which almost has to happen.
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But outside the pitching, things just seem….off. I don't know what it is, maybe they miss the leadership that Anthony Santander brought last year? They need that alpha male veteran to bark at them, get the guys going. I know it's mentally draining to know you have to score 7 runs a night to win a game but try and piss someone off and get them going. I'm not sure who the leader on this team is right now. Is it Cedric Mullins, a guy who's been here for a long time? Mountcastle who's a veteran here as well? Ryan O'Hearn? Is it one of the faces of your franchise in Adley Rutschman or Gunnar Henderson? Someone has to step up and get the guys right. You can see guys are pressing already, this is a team who has been in a funk since the end of June last year, they just can't snap out of whatever this is. 56 and 64 since July 1st of last year, that's 120 games of bad baseball. Cause for concern. i don't think they'd fire Brandon Hyde, either, not yet at least. Firing him wouldn't do anything, I'll tell you that much. The thing about fans is we often overreact and want heads to roll and people forced out and fired, that isn't how teams operate, that's how we operate.
I mean shit, if the REDS can see that you're flat, you've got to do something. Need someone to get them right and wash this funk off, no idea what it is or where it came from but get it out of here. It's a group of incredibly young and talented guys all collectively not having success personally or as a team for the first time most likely. Something as embarrassing as watching Jorge Mateo and Gary Sanchez pitch in the same game as you're getting your teeth kicked in on Easter should wake someone up. I don't know who or what needs to change, but they've got to figure something out quick. Have to turn this boat around before they really start to fall behind and you have to think about moving some of these veterans at the deadline.
I still think this offense can turn things around and score 6-7 runs every night, but it's hard to visualize them doing any damage or even finishing the season .500 with the pitching situation as it is. Even with those guys coming back, more needs to be done. It should have been done in the off-season and it wasn't. I don't want this to turn into a "wasting the primes of" talk, they've drafted and developed these talented hitters, now go get the pitching to help them. Grow the bats, buy the arms. The plan sounds great until you just don't buy the arms. Or if you buy an arm and it's 41 years-old and can't locate his curveball and has an ERA over 10 by Easter. I do still think moves will be made and they can turn it around this season. We've seen teams do it recently with the Nats and Braves a few years ago. Especially with how this offense can be at times, but until that pitching can get healthy or get any better, not much faith. It's past time for the front office to take these moves to try and get to the next level.
You don't need to overreact to an embarrassing loss like this, but man it has to make people in the organization uneasy with how things have been going for an extended period. I'd love, love, love to be proved wrong and have them play like we know they can, hopefully with some additional help. I just don't want this to become a fully wasted season, I believed in this team more than others mostly because I didn't think the injury bug would hit them and that the pitching couldn't be THAT BAD could it? But I'm on the wrong end of that right now, the masses appeared to right, lets see if they can turn this around. Hopefully they can be aggressive and make some moves to get this team where we know it can be. Until that move comes, just keep treading water and staying in the race. They'll get healthy and hopefully had someone, it's their only hope for 2025.
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PS. Adley hit a homer to go down 24-2 and the MASN account gave us the tweet of the game, so at least we had that going for us. Tweet was funny.