It was only last week that we saw the Orioles play these guys, and that went very badly for the O’s.
For the last month of Orioles baseball, they have come into every series that they have played with fans wondering, “Okay, can they start to get this thing turned around?” Most of the time the O’s have been answering that question with a no. Only one week ago, when the O’s came into a series against the Twins looking to bounce back after some bad defeats at the hands of the Royals two weekends ago, and the O’s lost all three games to the Twins while scoring five runs combined.
Here we are with the Orioles facing the Twins again. It’s an odd quirk of the schedule that happens occasionally these days, where teams meet for a series, go play different opponents for a few days, then reconvene for their rematch at the other team’s home. The squads will be playing in Baltimore this time. To be determined if this makes any difference. The O’s are better, but still bad, at home (8-9) compared to how they’ve played on the road (7-15).
This next series will have the Orioles facing two of the same three starting pitchers they saw a week ago – Simeon Woods Richardson and Bailey Ober. Two of the three Orioles starting pitchers will be the same as well – Cade Povich and Dean Kremer. Povich needs to start getting things going in a better direction here, because giving up four or five runs per game isn’t cutting it. Kremer is working on two good starts in a row and hopefully can muster at least one more.
The Orioles cannot undo the embarrassment they experienced at the hands of the Twins last week. That was a dumb series and there was no question they deserved to lose all three games because they could not hit or pitch well, Kremer excepted. The only thing that they can do is play well enough to convince themselves and others that there will be fewer embarrassments coming the rest of this season.
This is a team that the Orioles ought to be able to be competitive against. That’s what made the sweep by the Twins so embarrassing. Their offense has not been good, with the team only OPSing .679 – even worse than the O’s have been. Two of the starting pitchers the O’s will face here – Woods Richardson and Chris Paddack – have ERAs over 4.
They’ve got to get some stuff done against these guys because if Minnesota gets a ninth inning lead, Jhoan Durán awaits. Earlier than that, there’s former Oriole Danny Coulombe, still sporting a 0.00 ERA over 18 games this season. The choice to decline Coulombe’s option while retaining Cionel Pérez wasn’t the biggest of Mike Elias’s offseason mistakes, but it ranks up there, at least based on the roughly one-quarter of the season that’s been played so far.
Game 1 – Tuesday, 6:35
- BAL starter: Cade Povich – 5.55 ERA, 5.05 FIP in 7 GS
- MIN starter: Simeon Woods Richardson – 4.01 ERA, 4.84 FIP in 7 G (6 GS)
The pitching lines for these two guys in the last series were as follows:
Povich: 6 IP, 6 H, 5 ER, 0 BB, 4 K, 1 HR
Woods Richardson: 4.2 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 1 K, 1 HR
The difference between the Povich who had success at Triple-A and the Povich who has not had any success in MLB is the strikeouts. At Norfolk last year, Povich struck out about 28% of batters he faced, giving him a K/9 of 10.3. In Baltimore this year, Povich is striking out about 18% of batters, leaving him with a K/9 of 7.3. The extra batted balls in play are ending up in large numbers as hits.
All batters against Povich are hitting .295 this year, which is almost unbelievable. Povich is only stranding 66% of runners who reach base against him. The league average for batting is .240 and the league average strand rate is 72.2%. He’s had one unambiguously good start all season. Now that Chayce McDermott is officially off his rehab assignment in the minors, I wonder how long Povich has to prove he’s something better than this.
Game 2 – Wednesday, 6:35
- BAL starter: Dean Kremer – 5.24 ERA, 4.91 FIP in 8 GS
- MIN starter: Bailey Ober – 3.50 ERA, 3.66 FIP in 8 GS
Kremer has allowed just two runs in 14 innings over his last two starts. He’ll be facing Minnesota in consecutive starts. He deserved better than he got from his teammates last time around. This was the game where the batters went 2-13 with RISP, and also where relievers Yennier Cano and Gregory Soto combined to give up three runs after Kremer was out of the game.
Ober was the starting pitcher in the same game. Although he allowed eight hits over five innings, he was only charged with one earned run. The Orioles batters just could not get the big hit, as has been the case all too often this season. Then the Twins bullpen pretty much shut the door after that. It’s not fun to say it over and over again but it continues to be true: The O’s offense must do better than this if the season is going to go anywhere.
Over the last 15 days, the only Orioles who are batting well are: Gunnar Henderson, Ryan O’Hearn, Jackson Holliday, Ramón Laureano, and Emmanuel Rivera. Everybody else has been part of the problem.
Game 3 – Thursday, 12:35
- BAL starter: Tomoyuki Sugano – 2.72 ERA, 4.60 FIP in 8 GS
- MIN starter: Chris Paddack – 4.76 ERA, 5.11 FIP in 8 GS
I want Sugano to keep being good, because I think it would be a great story for the Orioles to bring over a late-career veteran from Japan and have that work out well for everybody. I’m nervous about whether that will keep being the case because he’s just not striking out many guys overall. It’s tough, but not impossible, to succeed like that in MLB today. It’s a continual tightrope act. He might be able to beat the odds and make it work. The O’s certainly could use that.
Paddack, like all of his fellow Twins starters, is right-handed, so the Orioles will not have to contend with their “we’re strangely bad against lefties” initially in any of the games of this series. Which is a good thing, because the .505 OPS against lefty starters is indeed really bad. Of course, at times they’re also bad against righty starters even though their overall OPS is fine (.757).
The homer-prone Paddack, who doesn’t strike many guys out (though still more than Sugano), ought to be a guy they can capitalize against. What is and what ought to be diverge frequently in baseball and in life.
**
If you take the bWAR of the entire Minnesota Twins pitching staff, that adds up to 7.0. You can make the same sum of Orioles pitcher bWAR and that comes out to -0.8. That difference of eight wins is literally the difference between the Orioles being in last place right now and the Orioles being in first place instead.
Charlie Morton (-1.2) and Kyle Gibson (-0.8) are two of the big anchors here, but the fact is that two guys in the negatives – Kremer and Povich – are starting in this series and they need to do better too. A whole lot of things need to start going better quickly for the 2025 O’s season to avoid ending up as the bitter disappointment it has been thus far.