Povich’s strong start, Orioles offense help clinch WC1 with 7-2 win over the Twins

The Orioles had to win to clinch the top wild card on Friday night. They took care of business.

Postseason baseball is coming back to Baltimore in 2024. The Orioles confirmed it with a reasonably dominant win over the Twins on Friday night. Rookie starting pitcher Cade Povich turned in a strong start, the O’s hit two homers and had 12 hits overall, and for the most part they cruised to a convincing 7-2 victory, guaranteeing themselves the WC1 spot with their 89th win of the season.

There’s nothing quite like a good revenge game, as long as it’s someone on the Orioles who is getting the revenge. Not that Povich, who was originally drafted by the Twins before being traded to the O’s in the Jorge López deal, was necessarily out looking for revenge. But he was throwing with a little extra oomph, recording his hardest fastballs of his big league career.

That can’t have hurt in an outing that saw the Orioles rookie at one point retire eleven straight Twins batters. That stretch began after Povich allowed a two-out double in the first and carried all the way to a one-out walk in the fifth. In all, Povich gave up just two hits and a walk across a 5.2 inning start. You can nitpick if you want that Povich only had two strikeouts. I will not.

It was all the more impressive that Povich went that far into the game because the very first batter of the game for Minnesota, Manuel Margot, took 13 pitches before being retired. Talk about settling down from a rough beginning. He’s made about as good of a case as he could have for earning a spot on the postseason roster for the Orioles.

Povich needed to be on, because the Orioles never led by much while he was in the game. The O’s blasted their way onto the scoreboard in the second inning. Adley Rutschman picked up an opposite field single (the first of his two hits in the game), then rounded the rest of the bases as Ryan O’Hearn took Twins starter Pablo López deep, his 14th home run of the season. Although Ryan Mountcastle followed O’Hearn’s homer with a double, the O’s couldn’t score him there and that 2-0 lead was all that Povich ever had to work with. It was enough.

For the Twins, who were backed against the wall and needed to win this game to stay alive for their postseason hopes, López gave them a heroic effort, a career-high 111 pitches to avoid having to trust a ragged bullpen. That got López through 5.2 innings as well, with eight strikeouts recorded against six hits and three walks. O’Hearn’s home run scored the only two runs that López allowed.

Minnesota was right not to want to see its bullpen. The Orioles added another run in the seventh inning, as Colton Cowser offered another exclamation point on his Rookie of the Year case in hitting his 24th homer of the season. In an amusing coincidence, immediately before Cowser hit the home run, MASN shared this picture of a selfie that Cowser took during the clubhouse celebration in New York, right after he brought up seeing The Great Gatsby:

The Orioles really blew the game open in the top of the eighth, with the Orioles greeting Twins reliever Kody Funderburk with four straight singles. They eventually got four runs across the plate in the inning, including a sacrifice fly and an RBI groundout. That’s the stuff the Orioles haven’t been doing lately, cashing in the “easy” scoring chances where you can get the run across even while making an out.

Jacob Webb and Danny Coulombe combined to get the Orioles into the ninth inning while keeping the Twins off the scoreboard. Seranthony Domínguez came on for a tune-up inning or something to finish off the game. He pitched like he needs more of a tune-up, walking the first batter and giving up a double to the second. Domínguez let the first two men on base and both ended up scoring, breaking up the shutout. Don’t let the dread set in about the probability of Domínguez being called on for important innings next week. Don’t let it set in.

It’s a good thing that the Orioles took care of business themselves, because the Tigers are finishing their season off against the White Sox. Detroit handed Chicago its record-setting 121st loss before the O’s game was over on Friday night. They might not lose the rest of the weekend. We might have all felt more tense if the O’s hadn’t sealed the deal yet. If this is the kind of offense that the team will bring into the postseason, we can all feel good about that. The Orioles had 12 hits in the game.

Elsewhere, the Royals lost to the Braves, which makes it most likely that the Orioles will be hosting Detroit in Baltimore starting on Tuesday. Kansas City would have to win one more game than the Tigers over the last two in order to take the WC2 spot for themselves. The Royals and Tigers entered Friday with the same record, and the Royals have the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Tigers.

The last two games of the regular season now have no postseason stakes for either the Orioles or the Twins. Tough luck for the Fox network, which opted to turn Saturday’s O’s-Twins game into one of its national games of the week, probably assuming some high stakes. There won’t be a MASN broadcast, it’ll only have the Fox crew. Orioles radio is unaffected. That’s a 7:15 start.

The Orioles do not have a starting pitcher listed yet. They’ve held off on naming a starter to see what is clinched and how hard they need to push to secure the home wild card games. The Twins are sending out 24-year-old righty rookie Zebby Matthews, who has a 5.71 ERA through eight starts. If the Orioles record a 90th win by winning one of the next two games, that will mark the first consecutive 90+ win seasons by the team since 1982-83.