Something has to give in Baltimore, and that something might be Morton.
More than a few teams have gotten off to disappointing starts to the 2025 season.
But arguably none have been quite as disappointing as the Baltimore Orioles, who sit in the cellar of the AL East at 9-14 entering play on Thursday.
Armed with one of the most impressive young crops of position-player talent in the sport, the arrow was supposed to be pointing straight up for this franchise.
Instead, things are threatening to go off the rails completely.
The main culprit? A starting rotation that ranks dead last in the league in ERA by a country mile. (O’s starters have posted a 6.08 mark so far this season; the Colorado Rockies sit in 29th — at 5.47, more than a half-run better.)
Mike Elias’ failure to meaningfully address the position over the offseason, plus injuries to Grayson Rodriguez and Zach Eflin, has left Baltimore without much of anywhere to turn right now.
Still, something has to give; the O’s simply can’t afford to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. And now it looks like the team may have finally found its scapegoat in veteran Charlie Morton.
Orioles could exile Charlie Morton in the bullpen after miserable start
No one is pitching well in Baltimore right now, but Morton has been in a class all his own so far this season.
He’s 0-5 with a 10.89 ERA after getting lit up for seven runs in 2.1 innings against the Cincinnati Reds last weekend, and his 25 earned runs are tops in the Majors.
While the O’s don’t have a ton of appealing alternatives, those are untenably bad numbers; manager Brandon Hyde has made that abundantly clear already, and now it seems like they might cost Morton his job.
“Anything is on the table at [this] point,” Hyde told the Baltimore Sun when asked earlier this week about whether he’d consider moving Morton to the bullpen.
Again, it’s unclear just who would take Morton’s spot right now. Rodriguez, Eflin, Albert Suarez and Chayce McDermott are all dealing with shoulder issues.
Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells are still rehabbing from elbow surgery. Trevor Rogers started a rehab assignment at Triple-A on Wednesday, but he’s been battling a kneecap subluxation since the winter and figures to need some time to build up — plus, it’s not like he was much better after coming over to Baltimore at last year’s trade deadline.
The simple reality is that the O’s do not have enough pitching; bad injury luck certainly has something to do with that, but a lot of these issues were known entering the winter.
Elias knew what his team’s biggest need was and thought he could address it on the cheap, to disastrous results. Now Baltimore is stuck between a rock and a hard place: Morton isn’t a viable big-league starter right now, but no one else is either.
