The MASN booth was saying something like: “Gosh, Tomoyuki Sugano looks so good this month.” “Yeah, he’s really been limiting the home r—” Whoops. This was barely a game before Boston’s Roman Anthony put his team up 1-0, having launched a long ball into the right-center field seats.
Well, blame the booth. Sugano didn’t have his best command today, and the home run ball was a problem. Two home run balls, actually: after Anthony, the very first batter, homered, a clean four innings went by, then Jarren
Duran hit a three-run home run that turned a 3-1 O’s lead into a 4-3 hole. The Orioles went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position, and it was that kind of night.
Boston trotted out a lefty opener in Brennan Bernardino, but this turned out to be kind of a red herring, as Bernardino only pitched one inning. It was a scoreless one, despite Jeremiah Jackson (looking swanky in the No. 2 hole!) legging out an infield single and then some when shortstop Trevor Story airmailed the throw into the seats. But Gunnar, despite his .371 average with RISP, struck out on a nasty breaking ball and Ryan Mountcastle just missed an oppo taco.
As the saying goes: if you can’t hit with RISP, just hit 400-foot bombs to center, instead. That’s what Colton Cowser did when new pitcher Richard Fitts, a righty, left a tasty curveball hanging in the zone. What a swing! We were tied.
The Orioles got another RBI opportunity when, with two outs in the third inning, they loaded the bases without a hit: Gunnar walked, Ryan Mountcastle got hit in the hip, and Coby Mayo worked a big-boy walk, laying off some low-and-outside sliders. With two outs, Colton Cowser had a chance to pad his RBI totals.
The Milkman delivereth again! With the count 1-and-2, Cowser fouled off a 97 mph fastball, then squared up a cement-mixer changeup. The ball sailed through the right side of the infield, scoring Gunnar and Mounty. 3-1, O’s. What a huge clutch hit!
Or at least it looked like it would be. A 3-1 lead with a dominant Sugano could have been smooth sailing, but this wasn’t Sugano’s finest night. The Japanese righty was making a nasty habit of letting the leadoff hitter reach—Anthony’s first-inning bomb, a walk to countryman Masataka Yoshida in the second, a third-inning double by Connor Wong—and not getting burned for it.
He was a webgem away from doing it again in the fourth inning, as Nathaniel Lowe hit what looked like a Bermuda Triangle blooper. But as the ball was arcing downward, our All-Star shortstop, Gunnar, made a ridiculous, tumbling over-the-shoulder catch, rolling onto his bum and losing his cap in the process. It was such a good catch that Tommy Sugar’s reaction was a chuckle.
But Houdini’s luck ran out in the fifth inning, and there was nothing Gunnar could do about it. With two on, Sugano missed badly, leaving an 88-mph splitter in the middle of the plate and Jarren Duran hammered it.
The lead was now a hole, which is a bummer. But truthfully, at 4-3 in the fifth, this was still totally, truly, eminently a winnable game.
But the O’s couldn’t push a runner across—and they had chances! It was… frustrating. The O’s went down like lambs in the fifth inning against Richard Fitts.
In the sixth, facing lefty Steven Matz (yeah, he’s a reliever now! And he pitches for Boston!) they wasted a one-out Cowser single (his third hit of the game) when the Milkman was erased by a Samuel Basallo double play.
Dylan Carlson (who hit several balls hard today) led off the seventh with a double, but he ran into a buzzsaw at third base after Luis Vázquez attempted to bunt and Matz pounced on it.
Ditto the eighth: Gunnar, trying to win this whole game on his own, doubled to lead off the inning. Ryan Mountcastle was called out on a pitch wide of the strike zone (the robot umps can’t come soon enough). Not Mounty’s fault. As for Coby Mayo going fishing: indeed his fault. Cowser also whiffed, on a good pitch at least…
Nothing doing in the ninth, either. Against an annoyingly-resurgent Aroldis Chapman (what is this, 2014?) Basallo took a huge hack. I liked it, but he just missed nailing the fastball, and flew out instead. Carlson stung another ball, but third baseman Alex Baseman made a good snag. Luis Vázquez, invisible at the plate tonight, flew out and it was over.
It was great to see Cowser crushing it, and a bullpen duo of Grant Wolfram and Corbin Martin looked surprisingly competent. But so much bad luck and bad hitting makes for a quite a downer of a game.
Even this recap’s syntax is starting to mirror the dull sequence of repeated bad at-bats. Let’s call it quits here and hope the bats wake up tomorrow.
