Orioles collapse again in painful walkoff loss to Red Sox, 5-3

Forget what I wrote this morning. Maybe the Orioles aren’t, in fact, a good team just waiting to bust out. Maybe they’re just not good at all.

It would be hard to draw any other conclusion after their latest debacle of a ballgame, a gut-punch walkoff loss in Boston that featured another futile offensive performance, brutal defensive lapses, questionable managing, and a bullpen meltdown. It all added up to a gruesome 5-3 defeat that sealed a Red Sox series win and sent the O’s reeling into the off day.

If there was one thing to like about this game, it was the masterful performance by Dean Kremer. The fifth-year right-hander has looked like a brand new pitcher since adding a mysterious new pitch to his arsenal last month, entering the night with four quality starts in his last five games, and his performance tonight was one of his most dominant of the year. He matched his season high with seven innings, the first time he’d gone that long — or even gotten an out past the sixth inning — since April.

Kremer even got stronger as the game went on. From the fifth inning through the seventh, he mowed down all nine batters he faced, with only one even getting the ball to the outfield. Even as he topped the 100-pitch mark — finishing with 103, his second most of the season — Sox hitters couldn’t touch him. It was a performance every bit deserving of a victory, if only the O’s still did that kind of thing with regularity.

Of the mere two runs Kremer gave up, only one was really his fault. That came in the fourth inning, when he couldn’t put away Ceddanne Rafaela on an 0-2 pitch with two runners aboard, and the #9 hitter roped an RBI single to left field. Kremer at least limited the damage by retiring Jarren Duran to strand two runners.

The other Red Sox run scored an inning earlier on Orioles defensive chicanery. With two on and two out, Wilyer Abreu topped a slow roller toward third base. Emmanuel Rivera made a nice barehanded pickup as he charged, but his running throw to first skipped past Ryan O’Hearn and into foul territory, plating the runner from second base. Ugh. Rivera was charged with a throwing error, though I think a better first baseman than O’Hearn would have scooped that ball. Again, Kremer prevented things from getting worse, inducing a pop-up to leave a pair in scoring position.

Rivera, for his part, atoned for his error by smashing a third-inning home run over the Green Monster. (Yes, that actually happened before his error, but narratively it works better this way.) Sadly, that was the entirety of the Orioles’ offense against Red Sox starter Nick Pivetta, who did to the O’s what so many other pitchers have done recently.

At this point you can just mark things off the Orioles Offensive Futility checklist night after night. Did they frequently find themselves behind in the count? Check. Did they hack at pitches out of the strike zone while letting fat meatballs go by untouched? Check. Did they utterly panic with runners in scoring position, failing to even make contact with the ball? You better believe that’s a check.

The top of the second inning perfectly encapsulated the Orioles’ ongoing RISP woes. With one out, Colton Cowser reached on a gift triple when three Red Sox fielders failed to catch a routine pop-up. With two chances to score the run, do you want to guess whether the O’s put a ball in play? My friends, of course they didn’t. Pivetta struck out both Austin Slater and Jackson Holliday to leave Cowser a lame duck at third.

The Orioles offense has to be close to setting a record for most strikeouts with runners in scoring position. It’s uncanny. You would think the pressure would be on the pitcher in those situations, but O’s hitters haven’t gotten the memo.

Pivetta worked six strong innings, racking up nine strikeouts. Only once after the second did the O’s get a runner into scoring position, Gunnar Henderson in the fifth, who was left stranded on — you guessed it — a strikeout, this one by Cedric Mullins.

The only thing the Birds’ bats occasionally do well is hit dingers, and sure enough, that’s how they got back in the game against a porous Boston bullpen. With two outs in the eighth, Anthony Santander crushed his 41st homer of the year, a 408-foot shot to right off rookie Justin Slaten. Good old Anthony. We’re knotted up at two.

The Orioles’ bullpen held the line for two innings to keep it tied, but in the process, manager Brandon Hyde made a fateful decision that ultimately, in my opinion, cost the O’s the game. With only three relievers that he trusts, Hyde used all three of them — Cionel Pérez, Yennier Cano, and Seranthony Dominguez — for the eighth and ninth. But here’s the thing: Cano threw a grand total of two pitches in the eighth, getting a popout to strand two inherited runners from Pérez, and then...Hyde took him out.

Wait, what? Unless Cano had an undisclosed injury, there’s no reason he couldn’t have pitched the ninth inning as well. The O’s are off tomorrow and, again, he had thrown just two pitches. Instead, Hyde started the ninth inning with Dominguez, and while the closer got through a scoreless frame, that left the Birds with none of their best relievers available for extra innings. Hyde painted himself into a corner for no real reason, leaving the O’s with precious few options to close the game after they took the lead in the 10th on a Rivera RBI single.

Hyde rolled the Roulette wheel and landed on Keegan Akin, who has proven time and time again that he’s a fine mop-up or long relief guy who has absolutely no business pitching in a high-leverage situation. You can probably predict what happened next, but the way it unfolded was especially painful.

After Akin struck out Rafael Devers, Romy Gonzalez poked a routine grounder to second for an apparent second out...but Holliday muffed it, letting the ball glance off his knee and then failing to pick it up cleanly. It was a costly error not only because it put Gonzalez on base, but because it eliminated the possibility of Akin intentionally walking the southpaw-masher Tyler O’Neill to set up a lefty-lefty matchup with Masataka Yoshida.

So Akin was stuck pitching to O’Neill, and two pitches later, a three-run homer sailed over the Monster and a horrific defeat was final. This Orioles team is really hard to enjoy sometimes.