Orioles’ offense caught in neutral during 4-game sweep by Red Sox

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This was a very bad, no good, awful series for the Orioles. It was a disaster that doesn’t officially end their postseason hunt — that won’t happen until they’re mathematically eliminated — but reinforces why it’s an ever-waning target with three weeks left to play.

Baltimore faced the Boston Red Sox over four games at Camden Yards this weekend. The Orioles lost all four of those games, with Sunday’s 3-1 defeat putting a capper on a crapper.

“Of all the blows we’ve taken this year, this is by far the biggest,” manager Craig Albernaz said.

This was an all-around debacle, beginning with a two-out error from shortstop Gunnar Henderson that led to a three-run home run off Kyle Bradish. On offense, Baltimore just kept striking out. And, when it did have a leadoff double against left-hander Payton Tolle in the fifth inning, catcher Adley Rutschman back-picked Rece Hinds for an out.

When the Orioles entered this series, they were 0.5 games out of the final wild-card spot. With this four-game sweep by the Red Sox, they have fallen four games out with 18 to play.

Baltimore has lost a season-high six straight games, and the Orioles looked especially poor while doing so Sunday.

The silver lining of this haphazard pursuit of the postseason from a team now 69-75 is that nine of its remaining 18 games come against teams directly in front of it. The Cleveland Guardians are arriving Monday for a three-game series, then the Orioles fly to Toronto for three games (with another three against the Blue Jays later in September).

“We’ve got to win tomorrow, win the day after that and win the day after that,” Bradish said. “We’ve got Cleveland and Toronto coming up. Those are kind of the two teams ahead of us. So, if we take care of business, we should be back to where we want to be. But, yeah, this was definitely a big letdown this weekend.”

This lackluster display at Camden Yards doesn’t build much confidence for the rest of these games with playoff implications. Baltimore scored one run in the final 27 innings of the four-game set. The Orioles struck out 17 times Sunday to set a season high.

This marked the sixth time in Orioles history they’ve struck out at least 17 times without walking once. That most recently occurred in 2023. Baltimore also did so twice in 2019, including a 22-strikeout game against Boston, once in 2017 and once in 2015.

That left little room for mistakes. And yet a mistake played a critical role in this series-ending loss.

Bradish struggled with efficiency, and it seemed preordained that Henderson’s error in the second would prove costly. The shortstop tried to backhand a two-out ground ball and couldn’t glove it.

“I just didn’t attack the ball,” Henderson said. “Kind of let it play me.”

Eli White took advantage of the chance by crushing a three-run homer.

“Errors are going to happen. It’s what you do after,” Bradish said. “We didn’t lose that game because of Gunnar’s error. We lost it because I hung a slider to White. That’s about it.”

That’s not exactly true. The Orioles didn’t score much, either.

All three runs were unearned against Bradish, which brings Baltimore’s season tally to a league-high 81. The fielders haven’t helped their pitchers.

Even with Bradish’s shaky command and elevated pitch count — he needed 85 pitches to complete four innings — the three unearned runs shouldn’t have doomed the Orioles. After Bradish exited, four relievers combined for five scoreless innings. But, with the way this club is hitting, that lead was all Boston required.

Coby Mayo and Christian Encarnacion-Strand hit back-to-back doubles against Tolle in the first inning to snap an 18-inning scoreless rut for Baltimore. But then the strikeouts began in earnest, as Tolle cut through the Orioles at will.

Through three innings, Tolle had thrown 41 of 48 pitches for strikes. He finished six innings with a 77% strike rate and 12 strikeouts — good for a 57.1% rate.

“I feel like we just need to take a breath right now,” Henderson said. “I mean, there’s still [18] games, we can still make up some ground. It’s just, yeah, can’t try to force it all at once. It’s pretty much now or never, and we got to get it going. Just need to take a breath.”

It didn’t help that the Orioles stacked Hinds, Leody Taveras and Carlos Narváez at the bottom of the order. Hinds, who knocked one of Baltimore’s four hits, made his Orioles debut Sunday in place of the injured Luis Robert Jr. Taveras is mired in a 2-for-29 stretch since Aug. 27, with two more strikeouts Sunday. And Narváez has a .471 on-base-plus-slugging percentage this season between his time in Boston and Baltimore.

Those three were hardly the complete issue. This was a tepid effort up and down the lineup.

By the time left-hander Aroldis Chapman stepped on the mound for the save against the top of the Orioles’ lineup, a Red Sox chant had gained voice around Camden Yards. There was little to voice from a Baltimore perspective, except for the groans of frustration.

“It’s our job to get our fans fired up, to be louder, and we just didn’t do that,” Albernaz said. “The fans have every right to be frustrated and, for us, we have to control that. We have to go out and win games and just play better baseball. That’s what gets the fans into it. So it’s on us to get the fans louder.”

This article has been updated.