The O’s couldn’t pitch, couldn’t hit, and continued to look pretty much like the worst team in baseball. Can we get a redo on the 2025 season?
I don’t want to alarm anyone, guys, but…maybe the Orioles aren’t very good?
The O’s suffered their third straight series loss and dropped to a season-worst three games under .500 with yet another uncompetitive defeat, 9-0, in the finale against the Diamondbacks. The story was all too painfully familiar for the Birds. A lousy starting pitching performance. A complete lack of fight by the offense after falling behind early. Cionel Pérez doing Cionel Pérez things. Every irritating weakness that has landed the O’s into this early 2025 mess was on full display in this game.
It’s ugly, folks. Maybe a return to Camden Yards for a nice, long, nine-game homestand will be the cure to the Orioles’ ills. But right now there are a whole lot of problems with this team and not a whole lot of solutions.
For all intents and purposes, this game was over in the bottom of the first. Oh, it’s not as if it was a particularly prolific inning for the D’Backs — they scored one run, on a Josh Naylor sac fly — but one unfortunate thing we’ve learned about the Orioles this year is that once they fall behind, they don’t come back. The O’s have won only one game this year in which they trailed at any point.
Starter Dean Kremer tried to keep the game close, and he did a decent job of it for four innings, holding Arizona to two runs (the second on a Corbin Carroll homer in the third). But the O’s offense repeatedly came up empty against D’Backs starter Brandon Pfaadt. That included a pitifully squandered rally in the fourth after Pfaadt walked Adley Rutschman and Ryan O’Hearn to start the inning. Tyler O’Neill flied out to right, and with Cedric Mullins at the plate, both runners tried to advance on a pitch that bounced away from Jose Herrera. The D’Backs catcher fired to second to nail the lumbering O’Hearn for a critical second out. Mullins promptly lined out and a once-promising inning was up in smoke with no runs scored. Great work, guys.
The vibes got even worse in the bottom of the fifth when Kremer imploded, coughing up a single, a homer, and another homer — on three consecutive pitches. The back-to-back blasts by Pavin Smith and Naylor made it a 5-0 game. Kremer got two outs but never got a third, getting pulled for the second straight start without making it through the fifth inning. The first attempt for an O’s starter to step up in Zach Eflin’s absence was an abject failure. It won’t be the last to be so.
Speaking of abject failures: Cionel Pérez and his 19.64 ERA came in next. Sure enough, things quickly went from bad to worse, starting with a scorched Jake McCarthy double. In fairness to Cionel, he threw an 0-2 pitch to Tim Tawa that was a clear strike — like, 100% within the strike zone box — that should have ended the inning, but didn’t get the call. Two pitches later, Tawa laced a two-run single, with one run charged to Kremer and one to Pérez. Cionel also started the sixth inning with back-to-back walks but got through it without a run, lowering his ERA…to 16.20.
Down 7-0, the O’s staggered to the finish. Pfaadt threw six scoreless innings, capped by a GIDP by O’Hearn with two runners on in the sixth. That was the Orioles’ second double play of the game and a staggering 16th of the year in just 13 games. Sixteen! That’s the most in baseball, and a brutal turn of events for an O’s team that grounded into the fewest double plays in MLB history last year.
The Diamondbacks padded their lead in the eighth against newly recalled mop-up man Colin Selby, thanks to a Geraldo Perdomo home run and a Naylor RBI single, locking in the 9-0 score that would become the final. The O’s lineup flailed to the very end, with two Arizona relievers completing the combined shutout. Just a total disaster of a game by the Orioles on every possible level.
Only 149 more games to go!