MINNEAPOLIS – Cade Povich pitched shutout ball in the sixth, Ryan O’Hearn and Colton Cowser homered and the Baltimore Orioles eliminated the Minnesota Twins from postseason contention with a 7-2 victory on Friday night.

The Orioles clinched the top wild-card spot in the American League and will host Detroit or Kansas City in the opening round next week.

“It’s extremely important to get to home court through the wild card,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “We will be excited to play in front of our fans. There will be a lot of energy and excitement in the stadium.”

In the fifth inning, the Twins knew the Tigers had won and the Royals had lost, meaning a win would keep their playoff hopes alive. But they could only manage two hits in the first eight innings and trailed 7-0.

At their season high on August 17, the Twins were 70-53 and had a five-game cushion in the wild-card race. Since then they are 12-25.

“It was obviously more than a disappointing way to end a series and what was and looked to be a promising season,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, whose team was the defending AL Central champions.

Povich (3-9) gave up just two hits and walked one while striking out two in 5⅔ innings. The rookie left-hander made his first career start against the team that selected him in the third round of the 2021 draft. The Twins traded him to Baltimore a year later as the centerpiece of a package used to acquire reliever Jorge Lopez.

“I just treat every start like it’s some kind of tryout for the postseason,” said Povich, who went 2-2 with a 2.60 ERA in five starts in September.

Twins starter Pablo López (15-10) gave up two runs, six hits, three walks and struck out eight in 5⅔ innings.

“It’s hard,” López said of the Twins’ collapse. “We rode at the top for so long. Everything went well. It was fun. It clicked. And then nothing clicked anymore.”

O’Hearn started the scoring for the Orioles with a two-run homer deep in the second inning.

The Orioles loaded the bases with one out in the fifth. But López struck out Ramón Urías on his career-high 111th pitch of the night. Then reliever Caleb Thielbar retired Gunnar Henderson on a grounder to keep the score at 2-0.

Cowser tapped Thielbar’s pitch for his 24th homer of the season in the seventh. Baltimore scored four more runs in the eighth on five hits off reliever Kody Funderburk.

The Twins broke the shutout in the ninth on Carlos Santana’s two-run single.

Now the Twins are looking to the offseason to figure out what went wrong and how they can prevent a repeat in the future.

“You don’t react emotionally to these moments. Really, you look at it in the big picture,” Baldelli said. “You look at how the season as a whole has gone. We’re also going to look at how the last six weeks have gone, because that’s what a lot of us are feeling right now.”