As the Orioles pitcher walked off the mound, Baltimore fans at Camden Yards rose to their feet in unison and gave a raucous standing ovation — almost as if there were stage directions on the tiny videoboard in center field.

Amid a month filled with dreadful weather, Easter Sunday was a beautiful day for baseball — a bright blue sky, a tame sun and a faint breeze. Nearly 20,000 fans spent the holiday at the gem that is Oriole Park at Camden Yards to watch their local nine play a kids’ game for three hours.

It was a day worth applauding, but the several thousand Orioles fans who stuck around for the late innings weren’t clapping to express praise. They were doing so sarcastically, bordering on mockery and pity.The pitcher was Jorge Mateo, a position player, and he had just allowed five runs, including a grand slam, in an eventual 24-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds — one of the worst defeats in franchise history.

“It’s embarrassing,” manager Brandon Hyde said matter-of-factly after the drubbing. “It’s not what you want to do on Easter Sunday in front of your home crowd. You want to compete.”

“It sucks,” infielder Jordan Westburg said. “We know this sucks.”

If the Easter implosion were simply an anomaly during the slog that is a 162-game season, then so be it. The 1983 Orioles lost 14-1 in September and 26 days later hoisted the World Series trophy — the last time this franchise has done so.

But Sunday was just the latest sloppy showing by these Orioles, who find themselves behind the 8-ball with a 9-12 record. This ballclub is seemingly trapped in a vicious cycle of uplifting highs (like Saturday’s victory, its third in four days) and crushing lows. Sunday’s calamity was about as low as it gets.

Do the Orioles have what it takes to escape whatever hex they’re under?

“The biggest frustration on our end,” catcher Adley Rutschman said, “is because we know what we’re capable of and we’ve seen how good we are when we’re at our best and just finding that. Something is gonna click, and I think everyone just wants to see that happen as quickly as possible.”

However, Sunday’s loss is just one game. April is one month. The season is only 12% through. It’s simply too early for irrational, reactionary hot takes about this team’s future, skipper Brandon Hyde and general manager Mike Elias.

But for this starved fan base, the worst nightmare of this era of Baltimore baseball could be coming true this season. The Orioles are squarely in the middle of their World Series window, and through 21 games, it feels to many fans as if the team is letting one of those precious seasons slip away after the previous two ended with shocking postseason sweeps.

After more than 30 years of being one of MLB’s worst teams, the Angelos family hired Elias to be the club’s general manager. The goal was clear: Tear the big league team down to its studs, stock up the farm system and build a consistent winner capable of winning a championship. Elias and his shrewd front office executed the first two to perfection. From 2019 to 2021, the Orioles were spectacularly awful, but that failure resulted in baseball’s best farm system the next three seasons and the American League’s winningest team from 2023 through 2024.

Fans bought into the rebuild but remained wary of what would happen once the team actually became competitive again.

Would ownership be willing to spend the money required to reach the promised land?

Would Elias be able to flip the switch and make the splashes necessary to build a roster capable of winning in October?

Would it end up being worth it for the fans who invested money and energy on 100-loss teams that operated puny payrolls?

This past offseason, the hopes were high under new owner David Rubenstein. While Elias spent 73.5 million of the private equity billionaire’s dollars on eight free agents, none of them were star players who moved the needle. Ace Corbin Burnes left Baltimore for Arizona, and Elias’ solution was to bring in veterans Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano and Kyle Gibson on one-year deals.

The result through 21 games? An unmitigated disaster and an early indictment of Elias’ offseason.

The Orioles’ rotation has the worst ERA in MLB at 6.11 — even higher than the 4-17 Colorado Rockies, who play half their games 5,200 feet above sea level. According to FanGraphs, the Orioles’ rotation has been 61% worse than league average. If the group maintained this poor production for the remainder of the season, it would be the worst rotation in MLB history (since 1900).

“You’re not going to be able to win games that way,” Hyde said.

Despite the offense’s inconsistency, would Hyde agree that the rotation is the main reason his team is scuffling?

“Just look at the numbers,” he said.

Morton was the main culprit Sunday — and, frankly, this season. The 41-year-old, who signed for $15 million this offseason, allowed seven runs in only 2 1/3 innings when his bullpen badly needed him to go deep into the game. Baltimore fans greeted him with boos as he walked off the mound. What followed — eight runs off two struggling relievers and nine more off position players — was mostly a downstream effect of Morton’s disastrous outing.

“We knew they were flat,” Reds catcher Austin Wynns, a former Oriole, told reporters after the game. “They were deprived of their pitching, and we just kept on going.”

Through his first five starts in an Orioles uniform, Morton is 0-5 with a whopping 10.89 ERA and 2.23 WHIP. Baltimore’s brass is now stuck between a rock and a hard place: Injuries to Zach Eflin, Grayson Rodriguez and others have depleted Baltimore’s starter stockpile, but how can they keep throwing Morton out there?

“I’ve gone through enough failure. I’ve gone through enough searching, wondering about it, but it’s letting your teammates down,” said Morton, the most candid player in the clubhouse. “It’s letting your coaches down and the fans down. That’s something that you really never get over.”

While an extreme example, Morton might be a symptom of a larger problem. He is the eighth major league starting pitcher Elias has acquired since 2023. Five of them have ERAs north of 4.65 with the Orioles. While the trades for Eflin and Burnes were successes, the ones for Jack Flaherty and Trevor Rogers at the 2023 and 2024 deadlines, respectively, weren’t.

“It is not feasible to land and execute every single thing that you want to do, try to do, in the offseason,” Elias said Tuesday when asked if he regrets not investing more in his rotation this offseason. “And my entire job is balancing the needs of the team, the needs of the roster, versus the acquisition cost and what that might do to affect future seasons. That’s the job of being a general manager.

“We made moves that we wanted to, and I think we had some unfortunate breaks here early on.”

Orioles players, after Sunday’s defeat, disagreed with the notion that an April loss should serve as a “wake-up call.” Cedric Mullins, the team’s best hitter this month, said the morale in the clubhouse is sound but that it can “sway just with the momentum” of the roller coaster that’s been this season.

Instead of a “wake-up call,” Westburg called it a “kick in the butt,” and he expects the team to show up to Washington on Tuesday “pissed off.”

“This is going to piss us off because it’s embarrassing,” he said. “We need to come in Tuesday pissed off and win a series in Washington. I wouldn’t say it’s a wake-up call to change anything. I think it just lights a fire under us, and I think it will. There’s a ton of competitive guys in here who care a lot.

“Hopefully we learn from this and hopefully it kind of sparks us. I don’t think we need to change anything. It’s way too early to start changing things.”

Lucky for the Orioles, it’s early, and the AL appears to be mediocre. Despite the sluggish start, Baltimore is only 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot. Yet the hurdles ahead of them appear too tall to overcome. No team in MLB history has lost a game by more than 20 runs and won the World Series later that year.

The past two seasons ended with fans disappointed by the club’s October performance. At this rate, these Orioles might not even be able to do that.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer @baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.