I’m old enough to remember when the Orioles had a .500 record. Those were good times.
The O’s couldn’t keep up the momentum of their series opener, dropping the second game to the Rockies, 4-2. Newly promoted Luis De León, making his major league debut, coughed up a tie-breaking two-run homer in the seventh after a Jackson Holliday error started the rally, and the Birds’ bats once again went dormant at one of the league’s best offensive ballparks. The Birds’ loss combined with the Guardians’ win over
Toronto has dropped the Orioles 1.5 games behind Cleveland for the third wild card spot.
It’s no secret that Kyle Bradish has been looking a little fatigued of late, with a 6.07 ERA in his last six starts, and the high-altitude Coors Field sure isn’t the ideal setting to get back on track. Indeed, Bradish continued to struggle with his command tonight, with his pitches noticeably lacking the kind of movement and sharpness we normally see from the right-hander.
Bradish needed 20 pitches to get through the first, giving up a double and a walk, but was fortunate to escape with no runs. He wasn’t as lucky in the second. After two quick outs, Bradish coughed up a homer on an 0-2 pitch to Adael Amador, playing in just his sixth game of the season. One solo dinger won’t ruin you, but Bradish had trouble finishing the inning. Number nine hitter Zac Veen followed with another deep blast to right that just barely missed being another homer, deflecting high off the wall for a triple. Jake McCarthy then poked a timely RBI single up the middle to extend the lead to 2-0. By the time Bradish finished the second inning, his pitch count was at 46.
And yet, Bradish battled. You might say he Braddled. He managed to power through five innings and kept the Rockies off the scoreboard the rest of the way, even as he continued to labor. His only clean inning was the third, but he threw another 19 pitches in the fourth — allowing a double and a walk before escaping — and stranded a leadoff single in the fifth. Bradish exited after that frame with a pitch count of 95. He gave up six hits, walked two, and struck out four. It wasn’t a great outing by any means, but I’ll give him credit for hanging in there and limiting the damage.
That outing would’ve been plenty good enough to win if only the Orioles could, you know, hit. But for the second straight game, they had all sorts of trouble scraping across any runs, even in the cavernous hitter’s paradise that is Coors Field. It didn’t even seem to matter that they were facing a pitcher, Gabriel Hughes, who had a 6.61 ERA and zero major league wins in nine starts. As we’ve seen all too often this season, the O’s offense is capable of making the most nondescript and/or ineffective pitchers look like Cy Young winners. It’s not ideal.
To be fair, the Orioles did make some loud contact against Hughes throughout the game, but every hard-hit ball seemed to find a glove. The only run they scored against him came in the third, when Carlos Narváez led off with a single — no, really! — and hustled to third on a Pete Alonso one-out knock.
Then came a controversial play. Gunnar Henderson smacked a bouncer down the first-base line that TJ Rumfield appeared to snag in foul territory, just in front of the bag. But umpire John Bacon called it fair, and Rumfield touched the base for an out, then caught Pete Alonso in a rundown between first and second. Alonso at least managed to stall long enough for Narváez to score from third before the Rockies tagged him out for the double play. Henderson disputed the foul call, to no avail, and it wasn’t a reviewable play.
Hughes pitched into the fifth inning with a 2-1 lead, but he got into some two-out trouble on two walks and a single, prompting manager Warren Schaeffer to make a pitching change with the bases loaded. The poor guy came one out shy of qualifying for his first major league win. But Schaeffer’s strategy worked, as lefty Brennan Bernardino retired Gunnar Henderson on a pop-up to leave ‘em loaded.
The Orioles ever so briefly made this an interesting game in the top of the seventh when Jackson Holliday launched a game-tying solo homer, in the same ballpark where his dad Matt crushed 93 career blasts. But no sooner had Holliday played the hero than he became the goat.
The bottom of the seventh inning began with a routine Mickey Moniak pop-up to shallow right. Holliday waved everyone off, settled under the ball, and…dropped it. Just straight-up dropped it! No excuses for that blunder. Moniak ended up at second base representing the critical go-ahead run with nobody out.
Holliday’s error put his pitcher in an immediate bind, and that pitcher happened to be the 23-year-old lefty Luis De León, who was making his major league debut after being called up earlier in the day. Talk about throwing him into the fire! Craig Albernaz probably would’ve preferred for De León’s first appearance to come in a lower-leverage situation, but with the Rockies having two lefties due up, he took a chance on the southpaw in a tie game.
I’d love to say that De León delivered a stupendous inning in his debut and kept the game tied and put the O’s in position to win. Unfortunately, none of that is what actually happened, and it’s not all Holliday’s fault. With one out, De León left a hanging slider to the lefty-swinging Rumfield, who demolished it over the right-center field wall for a go-ahead two-run homer. Sigh. Welcome to the big leagues, Luis. While De León did flash some impressive stuff, including a nasty slider to strike out Hunter Goodman, his untimely gopher ball put him in line for the loss in his debut, assuming the Orioles couldn’t rally back again.
They couldn’t. Rockies reliever Juan Mejia worked a scoreless eighth, working past a two-out Dylan Beavers double and Samuel Basallo HBP by striking out a badly flailing Leody Taveras. Ugly at-bat there. And closer Jordan Romano finished things off with a perfect ninth, snapping the Rockies’ 10-game home losing streak and sending the Orioles back below the .500 mark. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
