It could have been a fun Friday night. A sellout crowd of 42,587 showed up to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, excited for an Orioles hockey jersey giveaway and today’s good weather and (if they haven’t been paying too close attention since November) the potential and performance of the O’s so far this season. All the Orioles had to do is give everyone something to cheer about. They played a stupid and bad game instead, getting their butts kicked by the Reds, 8-3.
The failure starts, as it has so many games in this 2025 season, with the starting pitcher not being any good at all. Cade Povich was the one getting wrecked on Friday night. Never mind that he had the benefit of facing a Reds lineup that, entering the game, was among the five worst offenses in all of baseball. You certainly wouldn’t have known it from watching them against Povich.
It’s not like this is a new problem for the guy so far this season. Povich entered Friday night’s game with a 1.800 WHIP across his first three starts. That is, 24 hits and three walks allowed in 15 innings. At least he hadn’t been walking too many guys or allowing home runs? He had a fine enough ERA of 3.60 before this game. None of those things are true any more. Povich walked five dudes and gave up three dingers as he stunk it up in this game, so now he’s got a 6.38 ERA. The WHIP is over 2. Sheesh.
There was a very short period of time where the Orioles were leading this game. The teams swapped scoreless frames in the first and the Reds did not score in the top of the second. Cedric Mullins led off the bottom of the inning by ripping a home run that just managed to clear the out-of-town scoreboard in left field. Mullins’s fifth home run of the young season gave the O’s a 1-0 lead. He continues to be the best and possibly the only good Oriole.
Right after taking the lead is the time for that classic baseball cliche, the shutdown inning. Can the starting pitcher let his team build some momentum by actually holding the lead? Povich had the answer: Nope. Facing the bottom of the Reds lineup, he walked the #8 hitter and gave up a single to the #9 hitter.
Povich got everyone’s hopes up by getting two outs. One of which came on a play where Tyler O’Neill dove for a line drive, had it bounce off the top of his glove, and Jorge Mateo alertly chased out to play the ricochet and fired in for a forceout at second base. Unfortunately for the Orioles, the next Reds batter was Elly De La Cruz, who happens to be in the top five in MLB for RBI on this season.
In one swing, De La Cruz added three more, blasting a home run off Povich to center field. This was briefly a disputed play, as the homer (weirdly, for the second game in a row) ended up bouncing off the top of the concrete wall that’s behind the padded fence, which counts as a home run according to the stadium’s ground rules. After a check of the replay, De La Cruz was credited with the homer. The Reds led, 3-1. They never trailed again.
Could Povich settle down from there? No. He came back out in the fourth inning and kept on stinking. Another poor hitter, Jeimer Candelario, took him deep to start off, then he put the 8 and 9 hitters back on base and gave up a three-run homer to Matt McLain. At least McLain seems to be a good player. This was his fourth homer of the year and the Orioles were in a 7-1 hole. Povich got the hook after 3.1 innings. It’s bad.
Also bad was the Orioles offense. The Reds starting pitcher was a lefty, Andrew Abbott, so the O’s deployed two of the guys who they tend to deploy against lefties early on: Mateo and Gary Sánchez. One guy who has sat against lefties so far did get a chance: Heston Kjerstad. The results were bad. Through seven innings, the Orioles had picked up a total of three baserunners. Two hits, one walk, and they struck out 11 times in those innings.
Sánchez led off the eighth inning with a single. Kjerstad followed by blasting a home run into the right-center field bleachers, cutting the Reds lead to 8-3. With no one out in the inning, this could have still led to things getting interesting if the Orioles could have continued to get men on base. No Oriole reached base for the remainder of the game from that point onward.
This was, as came up on the MASN broadcast, the largest April crowd outside of Opening Day in ten years. All those people came out with hope of seeing a fun game and they went home with a greater understanding of what the 2025 Orioles are all about. 15,000 of them got the hockey jersey giveaway as a consolation prize. Too bad for everyone else.
Jordan Westburg took an 0-3 in the game, extending his hitless streak to 27 at-bats.
The Orioles have a chance to even the series up tomorrow, if not much of a chance. The 4:05 game is set to have Hunter Greene start for the Reds. He’s got a sub-1 ERA through four starts and is averaging nearly seven innings per game for the season. Pitching for the O’s will be Brandon Young, who is being called up for his MLB debut. Six-plus years into the Mike Elias era of the Orioles, Young will mark the first pitcher signed by Elias as an amateur to appear in a game for the team.
