Kyle Goon: Instead of an ace, the Orioles bought depth. That approach is hurting them.

For the Orioles, it will get better than this. Just not by much.

The starting pitching slump continued Tuesday night as Charlie Morton threw another dud, giving up five runs in five innings against the Cleveland Guardians, who hacked their way to a win on a windy night at Camden Yards. To make things worse, the game was on national TV, so all of baseball can now see how ugly it has gotten.

The team with the highest ERA among its starters keeps stacking runs onto its tab, and Morton, 41, is having the worst of it. He has given up almost as many earned runs (18) as innings pitched through four starts, taxing a staff that is frightfully thin. A stern Mike Elias declared just 16 games into the season that the Orioles have already “tapped into their depth.”

The problem with Baltimore’s team-building strategy this season is that it seized on depth as the key feature of the roster. But in the end depth is just depth, and you wonder how different the next few months would look for the 6-10 Orioles if they had scooped up a top-end starter as they did last season.

Instead, the O’s are left hoping that Morton’s command gets a little tighter and that his curveball starts going to the right place. They’re hoping that Tomoyuki Sugano’s fastball is a little crisper, that Dean Kremer rises back to the solid back-end starter he’s been and that Kyle Gibson can give a workmanlike effort in his return to town.

In other words, we’re all crossing our fingers that the Orioles’ starting pitching can graduate from “terrible” all the way to “mediocre.”

We’re only about 10% through the season, but it’s clear Baltimore could get washed out early waiting for incremental improvement from starting pitching that hurts this team’s chances. Some of that is clearly out of the team’s control, because it has three top starters on the injured list. The most impressive part of Elias’ media availability on Tuesday was that he crammed no fewer than 11 injuries of varying severity onto a slip of paper no longer than a 7-Eleven receipt.

The tidal wave of injuries has pinned Elias and his front office in a corner because of the strategy they pursued this past winter. They knocked a major trade for Corbin Burnes out of the park in the 2024 offseason, then followed it by taking a frustratingly timid approach in 2025.

Just as they enticed fans into believing they might be thinking big, they started thinking very, very small.

When the Orioles weathered injuries on the back end of last season, Burnes was one of the best players who kept the team on track to make the playoffs. If this 2025 team had Burnes, who left this season for Arizona for more years but less annual salary, it might feel like Baltimore — which will be without Zach Eflin for a few more weeks and Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez for months — could have a fighting chance to win with its ace on the mound.

Although the injuries have been overwhelming, the Orioles came into the season knowing Bradish wouldn’t be available until at least this summer. Why didn’t they account for missing that top-end arm this winter?

While Burnes seemed irritated that the Orioles wouldn’t go more than four years, I have my doubts that Baltimore could have wooed him from going to Arizona, where his family lives. And Burnes isn’t off to his best career start, with a 5.28 ERA and 14 strikeouts in three outings.

But, if not Burnes, why not another big swing? Why not Max Fried, who is tearing it up with the Yankees? Why not trade for and sign Garrett Crochet, who has already flummoxed the Orioles once this year as a member of the Red Sox? Why not kick the tires on Blake Snell, who wound up on the Dodgers’ heap of riches? Why not see if a trade for San Diego’s Dylan Cease was plausible?

Point being, if the Orioles were willing to shell out the money on Burnes this year, they should have been willing to spend on difference-making starters once they determined Burnes would not return. Instead, they spread their cash on a few scratch-offs — several of whom look like they may not pay out.

Inspiring though Albert Suárez may have been last season, his injury shouldn’t feel this devastating. The team shouldn’t be hinging this much on second-year hurler Cade Povich or crossing its fingers that prospect Brandon Young is ready for a major league debut just so the staff can make it through this week.

When you invest in depth, that’s all you get. Depth may get you through a few dry spells, but, by definition, it can’t fix what ails the Orioles’ pitching staff — a lack of top-end talent. Maybe things shouldn’t be this bad in Baltimore, but with the free-agent investments this team made in pitching, it was never going to get too good, either.

It’s hard to know exactly how much work the Orioles did outside of the Burnes bucket this offseason. Elias implied that the team is working the market, saying he had chatted with rival executives “as recently as today” about possible trades. But, as ever, Elias couched every statement that might be perceived as aggressive or inspiring with a pitcher full of cold water. For now, the Burnes deal is the exception to almost every other fringy move the Orioles have made under Elias, and he didn’t sound keen on taking more risks.

“It is not feasible to land and execute every single thing that you want to do, try to do, in the offseason,” he said. “And my entire job is balancing the needs of the team, the needs of the roster, versus the acquisition cost and what that might do to affect future seasons.”

But in service of being prudent, conservative and working ever in the margins — instead of trying to push the Orioles over the top — Elias and crew may have not given this season enough of a chance.

There’s a lot of baseball left. But watching the Orioles’ pitching staff labor to scrape their way back to merely decent, that probably gives fans more angst than comfort.