Orioles fade, and their season with it, in 3-0 loss to Brewers

Matt Weyrich, The Baltimore Sun on Sep 20, 2026

Published in Baseball

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BALTIMORE — When a season is over, every team ultimately is what its record says it is. There are injuries and batted-ball luck and a bounce here or a bounce there, all of which impact whether a bubble team makes the playoffs or not. But records are the barometers that determine which clubs play in October and which ones watch from home.

The Baltimore Orioles, who hung around long enough to enter the season’s final week still mathematically in the contention for a wild-card spot, wilted this weekend with the MLB-leading Milwaukee Brewers in town, ensuring they would not finish this season with a winning record and all but sealing their fate as a non-playoff team.

Baltimore (75-81) lost to the Brewers, 3-0, on Sunday to drop all three games of a pivotal weekend series the team simply had to have. The defeat, coupled with a win by the Chicago White Sox, dropped the Orioles to five games back of the third wild-card spot in the American League with six games to play. Their elimination number fell to two.

It was one of the final blows for a team that entered September with as much momentum as it had all season, only for it all to go to waste. The Orioles finished August with a dramatic victory over the Colorado Rockies in which Colton Cowser robbed a game-winning home run for the final out. That win pulled them back to .500 for the first time since April, giving them a real chance of making a run at a playoff spot in the mediocre AL.

However, the Orioles have gone 6-12 since, and their playoff odds dwindled to below 1%. They lost Blaze Alexander, Kyle Bradish, Luis Robert Jr. and Jackson Holliday to injuries, but the inconsistencies that have plagued the team all season reared their head once again to finally sink a ship that had been on the precipice of crashing all summer.

Sunday’s game was the Orioles’ second consecutive shutout loss after being blanked 1-0 on Saturday night as well. National League Cy Young Award favorite Jacob Misiorowski got the start in the nationally televised Sunday Night Baseball game, but he was on a pitch count and lasted just three innings. The Brewers’ bullpen didn’t let that have an impact on the scoreboard and allowed just six baserunners the rest of the way.

It squandered yet another strong performance by an Orioles starter, this time Brandon Young. The right-hander set a new career high with nine strikeouts en route to his 13th quality start of the season, allowing two runs on three hits and three walks. Young’s 3.62 ERA is the lowest among any Orioles pitcher to start multiple games this year.

Brewers catcher William Contreras hit a solo home run in the fourth, and shortstop Cooper Pratt recorded an RBI single in the first to account for the two runs against him.

The biggest highlight of the evening for Baltimore was the return of Félix Bautista, who made his first MLB appearance since tearing both the labrum and rotator cuff in his shoulder in late July 2025. Bautista took the mound to his signature Omar’s whistle from the HBO show, “The Wire,” before allowing one run on another RBI single by Pratt.

Bautista averaged 96.7 mph with his sinker and struck out both third baseman Joey Ortiz and designated hitter Christian Yelich on splitters.

Yet just as Bautista’s return was more about setting him up for a full season in 2027, the Orioles have run out of chances in 2026. Perhaps next year the bounces will go their way.

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