Shane Baz has no one but himself to blame for this one. Between a lack of run support from his offense, substantial letdowns by his defense, and one especially terrible umpiring decision, Baz has racked up his share of hard-luck losses in 2026. As the Orioles tried to take their series against the Twins on Wednesday afternoon, Baz was bad all on his own, pitching just three innings while allowing five runs in the process. He left with the Orioles trailing and that’s the way it stayed, with the O’s
eventually losing by a 7-5 score.
The Orioles gave Baz a lead two separate times and he managed to blow it both times, all within three innings. That’s impressive, if not exactly good in any way for the O’s. To be sure, Minnesota is not an easy team to face. They entered the game with the American League lead in runs scored for the season. Good teams find a way to succeed in spite of that. Teams that are not good do not. Those who have watched enough of the 58-63 Orioles know in which category they belong.
Gunnar Henderson, once again leading off, drew a walk to start the day’s action. Pete Alonso followed with a single to advance Henderson to third base. This is an excellent situation to be in for an offense. The expected runs table for first and third, no out is roughly 1.75 runs. Teams, even disappointing ones, turn that into multiple runs quite a lot of the time.
Then there’s the Orioles. What they got was a ground ball by Jackson Holliday that was close to a tailor-made double play. It wasn’t, only because Holliday was able to sprint home to first with elite speed, turning a double play into a mere fielder’s choice forceout at second base. Henderson scored from third either way. There was no doubt about that at any point. The only question was whether the Twins would make it a twin killing.
They didn’t. Holliday got an RBI and the Orioles had a 1-0 lead. The next two batters struck out. Inning over. chance to really put a not-great starting pitcher – Minnesota’s Zebby Matthews brought a 5.23 ERA into the game – on the ropes. We’ve seen that plenty this year and we’ll probably see it again.
How long did that lead last? Three batters. Minnesota also got a leadoff single. That guy advanced to second on a flyout to left that nearly went over the fence. The next batter drove him in. Sheesh. Baz walked the next batter and was in danger of allowing a big inning, though he got the last two outs to end things.
The teams traded zeroes in the second inning before getting back to business. For the Orioles, Alonso led off by grounding a single up the middle. With one out, Tyler O’Neill lined a single of his own into center. That brought up Dylan Beavers, who worked his way into a 2-2 count before reaching down into the bottom of the strike zone to launch a fly ball over the high wall in right field and into the seats for a three-run homer. Beavers! That’s just his third homer of the year. I know, ugh.
That proved to be all of what the Orioles got against Matthews, who went five innings with four runs allowed. It was not, however, all of what the Twins would get against Baz.
Staked to this three-run lead, Baz set to the task of giving it up promptly. He allowed a leadoff double in the bottom of the third, then singles to the next three batters. At this point, he had the bases loaded with no one out and one run already in. A sacrifice fly for the first out brought home a third Twins run; the Orioles lead was now just 4-3. Light-hitting catcher Victor Caratini had a game-tying single, and if that wasn’t enough, Baz let Minnesota take the lead when even-lighter-hitting outfielder Alan Roden, who brought a .490 OPS into the game, delivered an RBI double to put the Orioles in a 5-4 hole.
On the MASN broadcast, Kevin Brown and Ben McDonald tried to pin down what was going wrong for Baz. McDonald said at one point, “It’s like they knew what was coming.” I don’t think this was an implication about sign stealing or pitch tipping or any of that. More likely, Baz has some tendencies that he fell into and the Twins were aware enough of them to adjust and exploit them. The broadcast also noted that Baz was not getting a good release point, leading to elevated changeups that were getting hit, and that Baz’s velocity was about 2mph down from his season average. Not much to do but keep an eye on these things in his next start. Baz downplayed any injury concerns after the game:
The Orioles did not get another hit after losing this third inning lead until the ninth inning. That’s a sad amount of time to get worked over. They did not adjust to what was going on. We have seen that happen a lot this season and we will probably see it happen again. They sent just three men to the plate in four of the game’s remaining innings. By the time they Orioles got another hit, they were trailing 7-4.
That larger deficit happened because reliever Cam Sanders allowed a couple of runs in the fifth inning. Sanders had pitched the fourth in relief of Baz without any problems, but it didn’t go well when he was asked to do a second inning. This may or may not be related to Sanders also having pitched two innings on Monday. He wouldn’t have been my first choice to go multiple innings today.
Left fielder Leody Taveras finally broke the Orioles hitless streak by leading off the ninth inning with a home run to make it a 7-5 game. That’s a classic of the genre of what we like to refer to on Camden Chat as an “FUHR,” so dubbed because it is a late home run that has no impact on the game’s ultimate outcome, so it’s really just like the batter saying FU, I’m hitting this homer. Is the FU to the pitcher? Is it to fans who will get their hopes up a tiny bit? That’s the beautiful part. It’s a little of everything.
Following the homer, Christian Franklin drew a walk by not swinging the bat when four of the six pitches that he saw were nowhere near the strike zone. The last one nearly hit him. Seeing four pitches nowhere near the strike zone is not a guarantee of an Orioles batter drawing a walk! Hey, just like that, the tying run was up at the plate with nobody out.
Colton Cowser took two pitches, also well out of the strike zone, and swung at the third, middle-in. He hit a line drive that went right back through the pitcher’s mound. Twins closer Yoendrys Gómez’s flailing reaction had about a 50/50 chance of this line drive hitting his exposed pitching hand and a 50/50 chance of going into his glove.
This is the 2026 Orioles. You know what happened. I know what happened. The 50/50 went against them Gómez made the catch, and Franklin, who needed to be running to avoid a forceout at second base if the ball got past Gómez and hit the ground, was easily doubled off. One pitch later, Henderson grounded out to Gómez to end the game.
He went hitless the day after his three-hit game, though to be fair to Henderson, he drew two walks out of the leadoff spot. On Henderson, we’re running a poll this week about whether you think he’ll be good for the Orioles again. Have you voted yet?
Winning this game would have flipped the Orioles and the Twins in the AL wild card race. The Orioles hopes would have been slim, with their next ten games coming against the Rays and the Yankees, but there would have been some hope, if a good version of the team could show up, that they could stay in it. Now the Orioles have 41 games left to play and they probably need to win at least 26 of them. If they can’t pull out a winning record against the good teams in these next three series, that’s probably going to be the all-but-mathemetical elimination point.
After an off day on Thursday, the Orioles will be in Florida to play the Rays. As of this writing, neither team has listed a starting pitcher for the 7:10 series opener.
