This was difficult to watch. The hit parade against Charlie Morton began in earnest during the third inning and didn’t stop even when the 41-year-old starting pitcher was in the dugout, his day done early.
The performance from Morton was nothing short of a disaster. But what is plain now — and what some said during the offseason — is that the Orioles didn’t act with enough urgency to address their rotation. Baltimore can rightly say it was aggressive in pursuit of right-hander Corbin Burnes, and missing out on him may have had more to do with location than contract value.
But the Orioles filled their starting staff with depth rather than ceiling raisers, and this is the result, even if it’s on the more extreme end than anticipated.
A 10.89 ERA for Morton, with seven runs against him in 2 1/3 innings during a 24-2 capitulation to the Cincinnati Reds. A 6.11 rotation ERA, the worst in baseball. A stadium ringing with boos as Morton trudged off the mound.
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The game grew so out of control that infielder Jorge Mateo pitched the eighth inning. Noelvi Marte hit a grand slam off him. Austin Wynns did more damage as he recorded his career-high sixth hit off catcher Gary Sánchez. This was the most runs the Orioles have allowed since Aug. 22, 2007, when they gave up 30.
Manager Brandon Hyde described the game as “embarrassing. It’s not what you want to do on Easter Sunday in front of your home crowd. You want to compete.”
“Losing by that much, just hate to see it, hate to be a part of it,” catcher Adley Rutschman added. “Yeah, I mean, gotta bounce back, gotta go on to the next, but yeah, obviously not what we wanted to do today.”
What comes next? The Orioles can wait for their injured pitchers — Zach Eflin and, later, Grayson Rodriguez, Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells — to return. But how many more of these starts can Baltimore sustain and still consider itself a World Series contender?
“When you’re in a game like that, it’s not fun to play in,” outfielder Cedric Mullins said.
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Last year, Morton posted a 4.19 ERA in 165 1/3 innings for the Atlanta Braves. But the struggles began down the stretch. From July onward, Morton recorded a 4.52 ERA in 15 starts. He allowed 16 homers in that span.
Even that would be welcome at this point, and his ability to handle a large workload played a role in the Orioles handing Morton a $15 million contract this offseason. Predicting a collapse of this nature through five games would have been difficult.
In his first five starts for the Orioles, Morton has conceded 25 runs — the first time he has allowed that many in a five-game span since 2010, when he was a young starter for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“I’ve failed plenty,” Morton said. “I’ve failed tons of times. I’ve felt this way a lot. I’ve felt like I was in a bad spot or I wasn’t getting my job done, I was letting people down. I’ve felt that before, more than enough. I know that about myself, inherently, that I can do it. It’s just really frustrating.”
The Pirates envisioned Morton as a ground-ball, sinkerball-throwing pitcher. With the Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros, Morton relied on his curveball to be the separator. It allowed him to blossom late in his career as part of two World Series-winning teams. But so far in 2025 Morton has scratched his head over why his curveball has been so unreliable.
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It wasn’t just his curveball that cost him Sunday, however. Morton fell apart in a third inning that began with an Elly De La Cruz homer and continued with seven of the next eight batters reaching safely. Morton was pulled for right-hander Cody Poteet after the second of four RBI hits from Wynns, the former Orioles catcher, but Poteet didn’t stop the bleeding in a seven-run frame.
Morton’s longevity and success made him an apparent floor-raising addition, a back-end rotation arm. But injuries to Rodriguez and Eflin promptly increased Morton’s role, and he has stumbled at an extreme level.
“If you gave me, I don’t know, if you said, ‘We’ll give you 30 starts to get this right,’ I’ll get it right,” Morton said. “It’s just, how much negatively do I affect the team during that process, right? That’s the question. Do I still think I can pitch well? Yeah. It’s just, some of the things that are going wrong right now, just throwing strikes. Making decent pitches consistently. Getting into a rhythm, some momentum. That’s the issue. But, yeah, I don’t doubt the fact I can get it right. It’s just, how quickly can I get it done?”
On Saturday night, Hyde patted the table and indicated how much this staff needed a lengthy start from a pitcher. “Come on, Charlie Morton, need you. That’s the bottom line. We need to give some of these guys a break,” Hyde said.
Morton couldn’t provide one. This was his shortest start since Sept. 22, 2023. He became the first Orioles pitcher to allow 25 or more runs in his first five starts for the team since Mike Johnson in 1997. And never before in Morton’s career had he allowed four or more runs in five straight appearances to begin a season.
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“I think the things that make me question that are, physically, can I do it?” Morton said. “I think that’s the big question. Like, is my stuff good enough. And it’s hard to judge it when you’re behind a lot and it’s hard to judge it when you’re in bad counts.”
After Morton’s last start — when he allowed five runs in five innings to the Cleveland Guardians — he said he was a pitch or two away from a much different outing. Sunday felt different. It was full of uncompetitive misses and hard contact. It left the Orioles far out of the rubber match against the Reds, and it dropped Baltimore to a 9-12 record.
There aren’t many other choices to start beyond Morton.
The Orioles optioned right-hander Brandon Young on Sunday after he made his major league debut Saturday, so Young can’t be recalled for 15 days unless he replaces a pitcher for injury purposes. Right-hander Kyle Gibson pitched five innings with one hit, two walks and one earned run against him at High-A Aberdeen on Sunday. That was Gibson’s third minor league outing, and he could be ready to join Baltimore’s rotation soon. Eflin’s lat strain is minor, and he anticipates a return in May.
But Sunday was an all-around debacle. It started with Morton and continued with free-scoring performances against relievers Poteet and left-hander Cionel Pérez. It spiraled even further when Mateo and Sánchez entered to pitch.
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When position players take the mound in a blowout, Hyde said, “just want it to be over as fast as possible.”
It wasn’t fast enough. And it leaves one to ponder where the Orioles’ rotation goes from here.
This story has been updated.
