Because it is a long enough regular season to test and re-test just about every variable, every team in baseball is going to have their wieners mangled in at least one game. Even the mighty zillion-dollar Los Angeles Dodgers recently had their tender bits forcibly run through a cheese grater by the Chicago Cubs. It happens! Still, it’s hard not to feel a little bit uneasy about the suffering delivered to the Baltimore Orioles Sunday, at home, in the rubber match of a weekend series against the Cincinnati Reds. The O’s put 41-year-old Charlie Morton on the mound to start the contest, and the Reds lifted him by his ankles and drowned him in a toilet, and then spent the rest of the game mercilessly bullying an increasingly ridiculous sequence of relief pitchers, rudely flaunting MLB’s lack of a mercy rule, to the tune of a 24–2 final score.
Things didn’t turn fully gruesome on Morton until the third inning, when Elly De La Cruz (who also made several eye-popping plays up the middle during the very brief period when this game could be described as “competitive”) socked a high heater into the stands in right field to lead off what would soon become a “Baseball Bugs” conga line for the Reds. Minutes later, struggling with command, amassing a nightmarish pitch count, having already used a mound visit, and desperate for an out by any means, a sweaty and flustered Morton attempted a pickoff move to first, missed wide, and allowed an unearned run to scamper home, the fourth of the inning. Reds catcher Austin Wynns then punched a Morton 2–2 changeup into center field to drive home another run, and Orioles manager Brandon Hyde decided to put his bumbling pitcher to bed. Reliever Cody Poteet came on and hung a 3–2 slider to TJ Friedl, who socked it deep to right; Ryan O’Hearn, who is defensively out of position at every position but especially in right field, made a hilariously feeble effort to catch the ball on the warning track, and now the flood gates were not just open but entirely gone.
