Indians Complete Sweep; Orioles Drop 10th Straight

Indians 9, Orioles 0

CLEVELAND, Sept. 27 -- Perhaps it's impossible for a team that is more than 30 games under .500 and has been playing mostly meaningless contests for months now to hit rock bottom in the final days of a 162-game season.

But leave it to the Baltimore Orioles to find a way.

The Cleveland Indians had only won three games the entire month when the weekend series began. They doubled that total with a series sweep of the hapless Orioles, secured with a 9-0 throttling Sunday in front of an announced crowd of 29,930 at Progressive Field.

The result, which became a formality after the Indians scored six runs in the first inning off Chris Tillman in the rookie's final start of the season, leaves the Orioles with a 10-game losing streak and five defeats shy of the third 100-loss season in team history.

"It's embarrassing," Orioles catcher Chad Moeller said. "There's no way around it. We go out there optimistic and come in frustrated. The whole point of playing this game at this level is to win. When you're getting kicked across the field like that, it's not a lot of fun."

The Orioles, who are 60-95 with seven games remaining, matched the 10-game slide they experienced around this time last season. They start a four-game set against the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday, just one loss away from hitting the organization's longest losing streak since dropping 12 straight games in August 2004. As it is, they are 35 games under .500 for the first time since they finished the 2001 season at 63-98.

"When the game turns hard in one direction, it really has a way of snowballing and getting out of line," Orioles Manager Dave Trembley said. "The only thing to look at is tomorrow starts a winning streak for us. Let's see how many games we can win coming down the final week of the season."

Trembley is trying to remain positive even though he's well aware that this stretch isn't helping his tenuous job status, which was already in question before the Orioles started a 10-game road trip by getting swept by the Toronto Blue Jays and now the Indians.

Andy MacPhail, the Orioles' president of baseball operations, who will announce a decision on Trembley's status during the next seven to 10 days, said even before Sunday's debacle that he had hoped the team would have been much more competitive with Toronto and Cleveland.

"I'm disappointed in this road trip," said MacPhail, who watched the three games from a booth behind home plate. "I know we're beat-up and running out of bullets, but I'm not real pleased with it. Some of it, I can understand. But I don't think Cleveland and Toronto are terribly different than we are."