Sarasota, Fla. – For the Orioles, a spring of uncertainty spent looking for signs that right-hander Chris Tillman would be able to move on from his 2017 collapse and regain his place as a reliable part of the rotation looks like it will continue beyond March.

Featuring a fastball that rarely bumped past 90 mph and done in by an 11-batter, five-run second inning, Tillman pitched into the sixth Saturday. But he was charged with six runs as the Orioles closed up business at Ed Smith Stadium with a 12-4 loss to the Minnesota Twins before a sellout crowd of 7,769.

It leaves Tillman needing to stress the positives and write the long second inning off as bad luck and weak contact. And it leaves the Orioles needing to believe all that to be true as he projects to slot into the rotation in the first two weeks of the season.

“Right where I need to be,” Tillman said after his final start of the spring. “I feel like this one was even better than the last one, based on what we’ve been trying to do here in spring. I was pretty pleased with the way this one went, other than that second inning.”

He featured aspects of each performance in his Grapefruit League bow Saturday. After an efficient first inning that required just 13 pitches but included a home run to right field by No. 2 hitter Erihe Adrianza, he lost the plot in the second inning. He began it with a four-pitch walk, then loaded the bases on a bloop single and a second free pass. He picked up his first strikeout of the game with the bases full of Twins. But after first baseman Chris Davis saved extra bases and multiple runs on what was ultimately an RBI groundout, Byron Buxton reached on a swinging bunt and scored on a double by Adrianza.

Tillman could have been out of the inning with a strikeout, but a wild pitch on strike three swinging allowed Robbie Grossman to reach and the inning to continue. The Twins made it five runs in the inning on a pair of singles — one an infield single to third base that Danny Valencia couldn’t come up with — before a third strikeout ended things for Tillman.

“There was one ball hit in the outfield,” Tillman said. “So I think that one I’d probably like to have back, but all the other ones were pretty poorly hit on the infield, but you can’t defend those balls. There’s not a whole lot you can do.”

After a clean third and fourth innings, Tillman had retired eight straight before Ryan LaMarre singled off him with one down in the fifth. He threw one pitch in the sixth inning just to acclimate his body to a sixth time off the bench, and left having allowed six runs on seven hits with a pair of walks and three strikeouts in 51/3 innings.

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