Put the brooms back in the closet, Orioles fans. The O’s missed their chance to secure their fifth series sweep of the season, dropping the finale to the Cardinals in St. Louis, 7-5. The Cards built up a big early lead against an ineffective Trevor Rogers, then held off a late Orioles comeback attempt to salvage the matinee.
When you give up seven runs, you’re usually not going to win — last night’s game a notable exception — and the Orioles’ failures today started with a lousy starting pitching performance
from Trevor Rogers. He looked promising enough in the first inning, inducing a lazy foul popout and two strikeouts, before suddenly he didn’t. The Cardinals ambushed him in the second: an Alec Burleson single, a Joshua Báez double, and a three-run homer by third baseman Blaze Jordan. How could a guy named Blaze do this to the Orioles?? I feel betrayed. In an instant, the Cards had a 3-0 lead.
The Jekyll and Hyde act continued for Rogers in the next two innings: a perfect third, followed by a crooked number in the fourth when former Oriole Ramón Urías tagged him for a two-run blast. It’s not been a good year for Urías, who has battled injuries and entered the game with a .548 OPS, but you wouldn’t know it from that swing. It was 5-0 Cardinals, and it marked the first time since May 18 that Rogers had allowed more than four earned runs in a start.
It didn’t stop there, unfortunately. The Cardinals rallied again in the fifth when José Fermín singled and stole second — on which he overslid the bag, but Jackson Holliday didn’t keep the tag on — and a walk and a single loaded the bases before a Burleson groundout plated a run. That was the final inning for Rogers, who was tagged for six runs in five innings. Don’t tell me that Trevor is starting to lose his magic, too. With Kyle Bradish and Brandon Young showing signs of fatigue, and Shane Baz apparently a bad-luck charm for the Orioles’ offense, the Birds’ rotation is looking kind of shaky all of a sudden.
Speaking of shaky, the Orioles’ bats had trouble getting off the starting blocks today, even in a game in which the Cardinals didn’t use an actual starting pitcher. For the first six innings, the O’s put up a hapless effort, looking nothing like the group that tallied 21 runs in the first two games of the series. I told the Orioles in that 13-1 win that they should’ve saved some of those runs for later. Didn’t I tell them? But they never listen to me.
The Cardinals’ bullpen game worked like a charm against the O’s, at least for a while. The first to take the mound was right-hander Gordon Graceffo, who hadn’t started a game since 2024 and hadn’t thrown more than 2.1 innings in any outing this year. He blew past that mark with three scoreless today, and it took him only nine batters because he retired every Oriole he faced. Come on, guys, at least make it hard on him. Could we be headed toward the first combined perfect game in MLB history?
Thankfully, no. Holliday greeted the next pitcher, Justin Bruihl, with a leadoff double in the fourth to give the Birds their first baserunner, but he was left stranded at second as the southpaw retired the next three batters with ease. It wasn’t until the fifth that the O’s finally scored, when the red-hot Christian Encarnacion-Strand doubled and scored on a Colton Cowser sac fly.
Bruihl went 1.2 innings before passing the torch to Luis Gastelum, who retired all four batters he faced to carry the 6-1 Cards lead into the seventh. And that’s when the Orioles’ offense finally showed up. Left-hander Caleb Ferguson got one out but gave up a single and a walk to put two aboard for Coby Mayo. At that point, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol handed the Orioles a gift-wrapped present: he kept the left-hander in the game to face Mayo. Uh…are you sure about that, buddy? Really? You know that Coby is like the best hitter in baseball against lefties, right? You can find batter splits on Baseball Reference and everything. Take a look.
The Orioles gladly accepted Marmol’s gift. Mayo dug in eagerly against Ferguson and demolished a 446-foot home run to straightaway center field for an Earl Weaver Special. With one mighty swing, the Birds had cut the St. Louis lead to 6-4. That inning was set up perfectly for the O’s, and they delivered.
Things got even more interesting in the eighth against righty George Soriano. Holliday led off with an infield single, and after Pete Alonso struck out — his fourth K of the afternoon, ouch — Gunnar Henderson came through with a long-awaited clutch hit, splitting the gap in left-center for an RBI double. Just like that, it was only a one-run game, and the O’s were on the brink of erasing a once-huge deficit akin to the Cards’ seven-run rally one night earlier.
Unfortunately, the comeback fizzled there. On a Samuel Basallo comebacker, Henderson dug for third base, and Soriano (foolishly, in my opinion) threw for the lead runner instead of getting the easy second out at first. The Cards were lucky that Soriano’s throw barely got him — confirmed after an Orioles challenge — but unlucky that their third baseman, Jordan, collided with Henderson on the play and had to be helped off the field.
The Orioles didn’t score again, and a Cards insurance run off Anthony Nunez in the eighth put the final nail in the coffin. Cardinals closer Riley O’Brien, who’d coughed up the game-losing run in the ninth the previous night, had an easier time of things today with a scoreless final frame for the save, dashing the Orioles’ hopes for a sweep. It was a bummer of a finish to an otherwise solid series.
