It's time to talk about Chris Tillman.
The Orioles' Opening Day starter, who retired four batters and was charged with seven runs — all earned — in giving back a seven-run lead and taxing the bullpen in Sunday's 13-9 win over Toronto, has taken such a clear step back from last year's late-season form that even his biggest apologists might soon acknowledge even a small bit of concern.
This isn't comparing him to 2014 Ubaldo Jimenez, a line of thinking that was fun and still shines favorably on Baltimore's favorite whipping boy other than Jimenez's astronomical walk total.
It's now time to compare him to the rest of baseball, along with what he's done so far in his own career. Those comparisons aren't flattering, either.
Tillman leads all qualifying major league pitchers with 4.48 walks per nine innings, just under 50 percent higher than his career mark of 3.1 entering this season.
His 6.22 ERA is second-worst in baseball behind the Minnesota Twins' Kyle Lohse, and his fielding-independent pitching, which uses strikeouts, walks, and home runs to calculate what a player's ERA would be pitching in front of a neutral defense, is 5.10. (All stats according to Fangraphs.) That suggests some room for improvement, but Tillman already plays in front of one of the league's best defenses.
It's simply difficult to pinpoint which of the other peripheral factors this year is most important, but there are several differences between Tillman this year and years past.
Through 14 starts, he's stranding a career-low 64.4 percent of runners on base, nine points behind his career strand rate of 73.5 and a dozen points worse than last year's 77.6 percent mark. The additional baserunners from his uncharacteristically high .314 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and the additional baserunners from the walks could impact that rate, but Tillman has been worse this year with both runners on (.274 batting average in 2015 vs. a career average of .257) and the bases empty (.301 average in 2015, with a career mark of .249).
Tillman has also not been putting batters away when he's ahead in counts the way he has over the course of his career. In his 132 career starts, hitters are batting .209 with a .555 OPS off Tillman when they're behind in the count. This year, some abnormally high batted ball luck has them batting .292 with a .753 OPS in those instances.
He's also fallen behind in the count slightly more, but not enough to explain such different results from years past. Lastly, he's throwing his cutter a bit less than last year (10 percent last year, down to 5.2 percent this year).
Maybe it really is just a run of bad luck that he'll turn around the way he did in 2014, when he started slow and was one of the game's best pitchers in the final few months of the season.
If he runs off 20 straight starts of three runs or fewer the rest of the way, I'll sit in the dunk tank and allow for the taunts. But no matter his track record, the games the Orioles haven't won with their top pitcher on the mound could prove costly in what will likely be a tight division race in the AL East.