There are many culprits.
Let’s all take a moment to think about the foolish past versions of ourselves who believed that anything good might actually happen to the Orioles this season. I’m no exception. I started up this series thinking I’d be highlighting the “Every game has a different star” part of Orioles Magic and it’s a whole lot of bad baseball instead. The past week was no exception. The Orioles have only won one of the five games they’ve played since the last weekly update and they’re on a four-game losing streak now.
This series looks at each Orioles game, the most crucial play that happened in it and who was involved, and the Oriole who contributed the most positive to a win or negative to a loss. These determinations are made using the Win Probability Added stat, which you can find in game logs on Baseball Reference or FanGraphs.
Here’s how that looked over the past week:
Game 31
- Result: Orioles beat Royals, 3-0
- Orioles record: 13-18
- The biggest play: Ryan O’Hearn hits two-run home run in seventh inning to give Orioles 2-0 lead (+20%)
- The biggest hero: Dean Kremer (0.426 WPA)
There really aren’t many better things that you can get for a team’s chances of winning a given game than a great starting pitching outing. Seven shutout innings from Kremer here was massive, the positive equivalent of so many bad starts by him and by other starters through the year.
Every passing inning of a scoreless tie is more crucial and Kremer kept delivering until O’Hearn could get the big bomb and come through for him. Some games, that’s really all you need. The 2025 Orioles are not playing many of those games, as we have seen prior to this week’s update and will see again as this weekly survey continues.
Game 32
- Result: Orioles lose to Royals, 4-0
- Record: 13-19
- The biggest play: Maikel Garcia hits RBI single off Tomoyuki Sugano, breaking 0-0 tie in fourth inning (-13%)
- The biggest goat: Ryan Mountcastle (-.116 WPA)
When your starting pitcher only gives up two runs in six innings, that should be enough to win. It especially should be enough to win against a team like the Royals, who until they demolished the Orioles on Sunday (described below), were an atrocious offense. They’re still pretty bad even after embarrassing the O’s the next game after this!
It wasn’t the Royals offense that was doing the embarrassing here, rather their pitching. Lefty starter Kris Bubic (.275 WPA) and reliever Daniel Lynch IV (.144 WPA) combined for seven shutout innings. The Orioles as a team only had six hits and three of them were hit by Gunnar Henderson.
Accordingly, the guy behind Henderson in the lineup, in this case Mountcastle, took the biggest negative for failing to capitalize on any of the opportunities that Henderson handed him. Heston Kjerstad grounding into a double play right after Ramón Laureano led off the second inning with a single was a bad one too.
Game 33
- Result: Orioles lose to Royals, 11-6
- Record: 13-20
- The biggest play: Drew Waters hits two-run single off Kyle Gibson, giving Royals a 3-2 lead (-23%)
- The biggest goat: Yennier Cano (-.302 WPA)
This game. My goodness. It could have been a signature, SMFB kind of win for the 2025 Orioles to turn it around. It was a signature, all right, just a signature loss instead that showed why the 2025 O’s are never going to turn it around. The O’s really punished Royals starter Michael Lorenzen, who ended up with a gobsmacking negative WPA for this one game (-.474) because the O’s kept coming back.
The problem was so many relievers stinking it up, with four of the five pitchers who relieved Gibson giving up two runs. Gibson did get wrecked (-.190) but, in game impact terms, not as bad as Bryan Baker (-.274) or Cano. The back-to-back homers off Cano in the seventh were the point where the Orioles never recovered.
Jackson Holliday, who tied the game with solo home runs in both the second and fourth inning and had three hits overall (.322), tried his best and surely would have been the hero if the pitching hadn’t have been so bad.
Game 34
- Result: Orioles lose to Twins, 9-1
- Record: 13-21
- The biggest play: Byron Buxton hits RBI double off Cade Povich to give Twins 1-0 lead in third inning (-15%)
- The biggest goat: Cade Povich (-.231 WPA)
It is a lamentably familiar 2025 Orioles story to have both the hitters and pitchers have a bad game. The O’s batters struck out 17 times and only had three hits all game. In win probability terms, however, the starting pitcher Povich giving up five runs in the third inning was the thing that buried them.
After Povich retired the leadoff batter that inning, the Twins chance of winning the game was 53%. (The home team has a slight edge in a tie game if they have not finished batting in the bottom of an inning.) By the time that inning ended, the Twins were up to a 92% chance to win. Nothing else mattered all that much, which is a good thing since nearly everything that came afterwards did nothing to improve this game’s outcome.
Game 35
- Result: Orioles lose to Twins, 5-2
- Record: 13-22
- The biggest play: Byron Buxton hits three-run home run off Charlie Morton to give Twins 3-1 lead in third inning (-22%)
- The biggest goat: Morton (-.165)
This was one of the least crummy Morton starts to date and that shows in his WPA number not being eye-popping for how bad it is. Still bad. His giving up the homer to blow the lead right after the Orioles scored him a run is emblematic of the season so far.
The Orioles have lost every game that Morton has pitched in. He was the biggest reason why in every game that he started. The fact that he pretty much had to step in to make this start for lack of any other options is a sign of how much of a mess the organization’s pitching depth situation at the high levels (AAA and MLB) is right now. Maybe Zach Eflin’s return this weekend will start to change that somewhat.
Plenty of negatives to go around for the offense as well, because the team had ten hits and that means plenty of men got on base with chances to pull the game closer, tie it up, or take the lead and batters were not coming through. Three different guys were substantially in the negative: Cedric Mullins (-.149), Jackson Holliday (-.120), and Ryan Mountcastle (-.105).
The best Orioles so far
This time last week, the best hitter by WPA was Ryan O’Hearn (0.88) and the best pitcher was Félix Bautista (0.78). Updated numbers through this week:
- WPA (hitters): O’Hearn (1.11), Cedric Mullins (0.50), Ramón Urías (0.32)
- WPA (pitchers): Bautista (0.81), Tomoyuki Sugano/Seranthony Domínguez (0.35)
- fWAR: Mullins (1.0), O’Hearn (0.9), Ramóns Laureano/Urías (0.5)
Sugano leads the team in bWAR (1.1), with O’Hearn at 0.9 leading batters.
The worst Orioles so far
In last week’s update, the worst hitter by WPA was Heston Kjerstad (-0.97) and the worst pitcher was Charlie Morton (-1.62). Here’s how things stand now:
- WPA (hitters): Kjerstad (-1.15), Tyler O’Neill (-0.47), Ramón Laureano/Jorge Mateo (-0.44)
- WPA (pitchers): Morton (-1.88), Cade Povich (-0.71), Kyle Gibson (-0.61)
- fWAR: Three tied at -0.5 – Gibson, Morton, Mateo
Morton has the worst WPA of any 2025 MLB player.
For bWAR, the worst pitcher is Morton (-1.3) and the worst batter is Kjerstad (-0.6).