Peter Schmuck: Orioles suffer a familiar fate in first game of twinbill

BALTIMORE-In a game that shined with the promise of a three-run third inning, the Orioles instead reverted to a script that has been played out too many times in the early weeks of the season.

Three has almost never been enough, and it wasn’t even enough for them to get through the next inning with the lead. The Minnesota Twins answered immediately with four runs off O’s starter Dean Kremer and that turned out to be enough on their way to a 6-3 victory in the first game of Wednesday’s rain-makeup doubleheader at Camden Yards.

Same old sad song and dance. An Orioles offense that has been chronically unable to tack on runs again had traffic on the bases throughout and managed only one single with a runner on base the rest of the game.

Kremer took the mound in the fourth after Ryan Mountcastle doubled home the Orioles’ first run and Gunnar Henderson followed with his sixth home run. It was a classic shutdown inning situation, but Kremer gave up a home run to Twins second baseman Brooks Lee on his first pitch of the inning and things quickly went south from there.

Carlos Correa followed with an infield hit and Kremer walked Will Castro before almost working out of trouble. If only he could have gotten past No. 9 hitter Christian Vázquez, this might have been a different day, but the Twins’ catcher hit his first home run of the year over the center-field fence and that was essentially that.

Kremer didn’t second-guess the pitch to Lee but clearly regretted the game-breaking curveball to the No. 9 hitter in the Minnesota lineup.

“One pitch,’’ Kremer said. “Monday morning quarterback … probably should have gone with my strong suit with two outs. He beat me.”

The Twins eventually tacked on a couple more runs of their own in the ninth inning, but they were irrelevant. The Twins defeated the O’s for the fourth time in four tries in a game in which Mountcastle and Henderson combined to reach base eight times. That’s got to sting.

“Dean’s been throwing the ball great, just had one bad inning,’’ manager Brandon Hyde said. “He slipped  a breaking ball there to Lee and hung a curveball to Vázquez for their runs. But we had three hits going into the ninth inning. It’s tough to win games that way.”