Bless you, White Sox, for reminding Orioles fans that things could always be worse.
The O’s continued to steamroll the worst team in the American League, completing a three-game sweep with a 3-1 win in the finale. Tyler Wells shut down the weak White Sox lineup, and the O’s offense, despite stranding an army of baserunners, rode three early runs to victory. The Birds also tied a franchise record with seven stolen bases, which mostly were irrelevant to the final result but was a nice bit of trivia.
The Orioles’ offense wasted no time making life difficult for White Sox veteran Martín Pérez, forcing him to throw 32 pitches in a laborious first. After Pérez retired the first two batters, Gunnar Henderson looped a single to left and hustled to second when the left fielder booted the ball. Tyler O’Neill worked a walk, and the two runners pulled off a double steal. Jeremiah Jackson then roped a grounder to the left side that deflected off the glove of the diving third baseman for a hit, allowing Henderson to score from third. The O’s eventually loaded the bases before Pérez retired Dylan Beavers for the elusive third out.
Pérez recovered for a couple of scoreless innings before the O’s tallied twice more in the fourth. The heating-up Coby Mayo muscled a single to center on an 0-2 pitch, and up came Beavers, who walloped a 398-foot blast into the right-field seats. It was Beavers’s third major league homer and his first against a lefty. Beavers!
Later in that inning, Jorge Mateo poked a double down the third-base line and promptly stole third, the Orioles’ third steal of the game. There’d be a lot more where that came from. Three steals against a left-handed pitcher is an oddity in itself, but the O’s continued to run wild all day, taking advantage of the defensively lacking White Sox catcher Edgar Quero. Even after Pérez left the game with reported shoulder discomfort, the O’s continued their aggressive baserunning against the bullpen.
In the fifth, Henderson stole two more bases and O’Neill one, putting two in scoring position with one out, but Jackson and Mayo both struck out. Beavers led off the sixth with a walk and stole second, just ahead of the throw from the overmatched Quero, for the Orioles’ seventh SB of the game. It tied the franchise record set on Aug. 28, 1986, a game in which even the notably not-fast Cal Ripken Jr. had two steals.
As before, though, the Orioles wasted the opportunity, striking out three straight at-bats to leave Beavers stranded. It turns out that all those stolen bases don’t help much when you go 1-for-11 with runners in scoring position. Other than the Gunnar steal of third in the first inning, which allowed him to score on Jackson’s infield single, none of the Birds’ steals led to any runs. That’s a whole lot of wearing themselves out on the basepaths for nothing.
The O’s had one more RISP failure in the ninth inning when they put the first two runners on base, only for the top of the lineup to flail helplessly. The White Sox relief quintet of Steven Wilson, Grant Taylor, Jordan Leasure, Brandon Eisert, and Tyler Gilbert blanked Baltimore for the final 5.1 innings, racking up 10 strikeouts. Kudos to the Chicago bullpen for picking up the slack after Pérez’s injury, but also, the Orioles’ offense is really going to need to be better than this if they’re hoping to beat good teams.
The White Sox, fortunately, are not a good team, and so those three early runs for the Orioles were enough to win. That’s thanks in large part to a large man, the 6-foot-8 Tyler Wells, who continued his impressive showing since returning from the IL two weeks ago. Wells took full advantage of a lackluster White Sox offense and dominated them for six strong innings, his second straight outing of 6+ innings and one run.
Only once in the game did the White Sox put multiple runners on base. That came in the second when they led off with back-to-back singles, but Wells induced a key double-play grounder followed by a harmless groundout to first to keep Chicago off the board. The only run he allowed came on a Mike Tauchman leadoff homer in the fourth. By the end of the sixth inning, Tyler’s day was done after a breezy six-inning, four-hit outing, with four strikeouts and no walks. He threw 89 pitches.
I must say, I’ve always thought of Wells as a relief pitcher in the long term, but the way he’s pitching now is changing my mind. You’d never know he spent nearly 18 months without getting on a major league mound after undergoing UCL surgery in April 2024. Keep it up, Tyler!
Clinging to a two-run lead, Tony Mansolino used his high-leverage relievers for a second straight day. Yaramil Hiraldo (who I guess is high leverage now, even though he just got back to the majors a couple days ago) mowed through a perfect seventh inning with a strikeout. Rico Garcia did exactly the same in the eighth. And Keegan Akin, who has had his troubles when pitching on zero days’ rest — with a 6.38 career ERA in such situations — was no worse for the wear in the ninth. He allowed a leadoff single to Chase Meidroth to bring the tying run to the plate, but then got the next three batters to flyout, including a nice running play at the warning track by left fielder Dylan Carlson.
And there you have it. A 3-1 Orioles win, a three-game sweep, and a six-game season series sweep. I wish the O’s could play the White Sox more often.
