MINNEAPOLIS – The first two Twins batters struck out tonight and six of seven were retired. Charlie Morton appeared to be launching his redemption tour at Target Field.

Byron Buxton had to ruin it in the third inning by launching a curveball into the second deck for a three-run homer.

Morton was removed after the fourth with his pitch count at 70, Harrison Bader provided some cushion with a two-run shot off Keegan Akin in the seventh, and the Orioles lost again, 5-2, to fall nine games below .500 for the first time since July 2, 2022.

The Orioles have dropped four in a row and 11 of 15. Their last four-game skid came within a stretch of five straight defeats from July 9-13, 2024.

Ramón Laureano led off the top of the third inning with a 425-foot shot to center field off Simeon Woods Richardson for his fourth home run of the season. The Orioles had an early lead, but it didn’t last long.

Willi Castro singled in the bottom half of the inning, Morton hit Kody Clemens and Buxton tagged the next pitch, which hasn’t brought the same results for the veteran right-hander that it did in previous seasons.

Morton hung a curve and the Twins led 3-1.

"I thought my fastball was really good," Morton said. "Sinker was really good. Threw a couple really good cutters. Movement on my change up was really good. That curveball I threw, it just hung up. I don't know what that was. I looked at it a couple times in the video and it just spun. Just a really unfortunate, really bad-timed, bad pitch.”

The Orioles pushed back Dean Kremer to Thursday afternoon and chose Morton to start tonight rather than try Akin again as an opener. Morton was only the second pitcher in club history to begin a season losing in his first six appearances, and he fell to 0-7 tonight, though his ERA was shaved from 9.76 to 9.38.

Having struggles at age 41 and in his 18th season is bound to make Morton question whether he's reaching the end and if he should step aside for the good of the organization. But he wants to keep pushing.

"Those thoughts kind of creep into your head - ‘What am I doing?’ Right?," he said. "Because if I’m not helping the team, if I’m just kind of weighing the team down, and I think maybe we’d talk about that. That’s the trap of still having my stuff come out well and just trying to find something in my delivery that’s going to help throw more strikes, just be a little more deceptive, just see the kind of reactions that I want to see in the hitters, and I saw that tonight. I saw a lot of late swings. I saw a lot of guys that didn’t see my heater, and I just didn’t couple that with a good breaking ball, one that was landing and it was consistently moving.

"It would be way easier if I was throwing 89-91 and my curve wasn’t spinning and my changeup wasn’t sinking and running and my cutter wasn’t consistent. It would be way easier just to go, ‘You know what, I don’t have it anymore. I just don’t have the physical talent to do it anymore.’ But the problem is I do. There are just the outcomes and the results are so bad that there will be times just randomly in the day I’ll think about it. I’ll think about how poorly I’ve pitched and I’ll think about how bad the results are. And honestly, it feels like it’s almost like shocking to me.

"I have the experience, I have knowledge. I still think that I still physically have the tools to be a halfway decent pitcher. ... I had one of my best seasons when I was 37 years old. But I still think that I have the physical ability to go out there and be a halfway decent pitcher. I know that it might sound crazy, but not too long ago, I actually had a decent year. So it’s really hard for me to think that there’s not a possibility that I just go out there and have a decent stretch or a decent year. So when I wake up and I think about, man, how poorly this has gone, it’s honestly like sometimes I don’t really know how to process it other than trying to be honest and rational with myself.

"You either quit. You give up. You give in. Or you say, ‘What’s coming out of my hand still can get outs.’ It’s just finding a way to better implement it. And I saw that tonight."

Bryan Baker began to warm in the fourth inning but Morton got a 6-4-3 double play after Brooks Lee’s leadoff single. Baker tossed a scoreless fifth, but Akin inherited a runner from Seranthony Domínguez in the seventh and Bader belted his first career pinch-hit homer for a 5-2 lead.

“I thought he was OK," manager Brandon Hyde said of Morton. "He just hung that breaking ball to Buxton. We lost on two hanging breaking balls on the three-run homer and two-run homer. He covered four innings for us after kind of a weird ramp-up to start this game. Just really a three-run homer there.

"He’s had that kind of one tough inning in most of his starts. Just made a bad pitch to Buxton there, but three clean innings besides that, so it could be a step in the right direction.”

Like Cade Povich the previous night, Morton was burned by one bad inning. He let the last two batters in the order reach base and left a ball in the middle of the plate for the hot-hitting Buxton, who’s homered in three consecutive games.

Laureano doubled with two outs in the fifth and scored on Heston Kjerstad’s single. Emmanuel Rivera singled to put runners on the corners, but Danny Coulombe replaced Richardson and struck out Cedric Mullins.

Mullins was 1-for-21 this month and 1-for-25 going back to April after popping up to end the seventh.

Jackson Holliday left two runners on base in the sixth. Kjerstad singled again with one out in the seventh and was stranded. Ryan Mountcastle grounded into a 4-3 double play in the eighth after singles by Gunnar Henderson and Ryan O’Hearn.

"We’ve got to fight from behind, learn how to do that, and mentally learn how to do that," Laureano said. "It’s just very simple. We need to figure that out.

"We missed a couple, they made a couple good plays. Just sometimes the game goes in different direction, like Mounty, that double play. It could’ve passed. Maybe. I have no idea, I haven’t watched the video. But it could’ve gotten a little rally there, but at the same time, those are excuses and at the end of the day we need to perform with clean hits and clean innings, and that’s what baseball is about, to get to the playoffs.”

The Orioles finished with 10 hits but are in danger of being swept.

"We didn’t get a clutch hit in a big spot," Hyde said. "I thought that we had some good at-bats tonight. It was good to see us use the whole field a couple times. We need to do more of that. Mounty hit the ball on the screws there. I thought that was pretty unlucky. But just not getting the big hit and not getting the three-run homer or the two-run homer.

"Been going on for a while. Just look at our offensive numbers. We’ve got a lot of guys struggling and not being where we hoped they’d be.”

Said Laureano: “I think everybody’s handling it, I mean, I don’t know. I can just speak for myself on that. I think I’m handling it good. Continue to show up, continue to work hard. Continue to think positive, optimistic. That’s what this game is really about. I think if we can do that, everybody has their own brain, you know, so I can’t grab their brains and go, ‘Hey, look at this, bro. Let’s go hard,’ you know? But no, it’s not going to work like that. But we’ve just got to figure out a way to get a big fire for tomorrow.”

* The Orioles acquired right-hander Luis F. Castillo from the Mariners for cash considerations and optioned him to Triple-A Norfolk. They made room on the 40-man roster by designating left-hander Walter Pennington for assignment.

Castillo made two starts for Seattle and allowed six earned runs and seven total with 12 hits and seven walks in seven innings. He pitched for the Tigers in 2022 and tossed 3 2/3 scoreless relief innings. Castillo spent the last two seasons in Japan.

* Tyler O’Neill went 1-for-3 with an RBI single for Norfolk before leaving for a pinch-runner, a precaution due to a wet field.

David Bañuelos homered off former Orioles pitcher Bruce Zimmermann. Dylan Beavers extended his on-base streak to 29 games and hitting streak to 14. Samuel Basallo singled at 115.9 mph off the bat. Cameron Weston allowed two runs in five innings.

High-A Aberdeen’s Blake Money tossed 5 1/3 scoreless innings with six strikeouts and lowered his ERA to 2.33.