If the Adley Rutschman’s 101.1-mph, 341-foot drive toward the seats in left with two outs in the sixth had gone another 10, maybe 15 feet, we were leaving early, to beat the traffic out of Camden Yards from a weekend of cold-weather April baseball.
We hung around, with the O’s up 6-3, hoping to see “The Mountain,” Felix Bautista, close another game out in the ninth.
Turns out, Bautista never hit the mound, and wasn’t going to, either way.
More on that in a sec.
My wife, Crystal, and I had scored tickets for the Sunday game in what we’ve come to call the “celebrity section” at Camden Yards.
Two years ago, sitting in the same section, we were a row directly behind famous-for-being-famous person Nicole Richie and her husband, Joel Madden, the lead singer of Good Charlotte.
On Sunday, the celebrities were O’s royalty – Cal Ripken Jr. was in the front row, six rows down from us, and one row behind was the team’s general manager, Mike Elias, who talked with one guy sitting nearby about the virtues of the Darden School at UVA, and also had some thoughts to share to nobody in particular about the, ahem, work of the umpiring crew.
Elias doesn’t know how lucky he is that my seatmate for the day was Crystal, and not resident #TeamAFP Orioles lifer Scott German, who would have been given a police escort about an inning in after having talked Elias’s ears to the point of bleeding.
ICYMI
Back to the game, which didn’t turn out the way the home fans had hoped: Toronto scored three in the eighth off Baltimore relievers Gregory Soto and Yennier Cano, then won it in the 10th off Matt Bowman, to close out a 7-6 win.
That was everything but a win for the Orioles (6-9), who got homers from Ryan Mountcastle and Tyler O’Neill, both out to left, taking advantage of the move by the organization in the offseason to move the fences back in.
The front office, ahead of the 2022 season, added 30 feet to the dimensions in left and left-center, and raised the height of the wall to 13 feet, reducing the overall number of homers to left and left-center over the 2022, 2023 and 2024 seasons by 137, according to Statcast.
Mountcastle was the O’s player most affected by the change, losing 11 homers, per Statcast numbers.
The O’Neill homer made it 4-2 Orioles through four, and a two-base, two-run error by Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr., on a 91.2-mph exit-velo grounder down the first-base line off the bat of Jackson Holliday, made it 6-3 in the sixth.
Gunnar Henderson flied out to center for the second out, ahead of Rutschman’s flirtation with a homer that would have put the game in the direction of being out of reach.
The Jays (9-7) tied the game in the eighth, getting back-to-back doubles from Andres Gimenez and Alejandro Kirk, an infield single from UVA Baseball alum Ernie Clement, an RBI groundout from nine-hole hitter Davis Schneider, and a game-tying RBI single from Bo Bichette, on an -0-2, two-out pitch from Cano, that scored Clement from third.
Clement’s one-out single in the 10th advanced the ghost runner to third, setting up Myles Straw, who plated the go-ahead run with a 68.8-mph exit-velo infield dribbler.
A Cedric Mullins grounder to second advanced ghost runner Jordan Westburg to third, but O’Neill struck out swinging, and Ramon Laureano, who’d replaced Heston Kjerstad as a defensive replacement in the eighth, struck out looking to end it.
That was defeat snatched from the jaws of victory right there.
“With the day off tomorrow, we were more aggressive yesterday and today with our bullpen,” said manager Brandon Hyde, who confirmed after the game that Bautista, coming back from Tommy John surgery, wasn’t available on Sunday, as it turns out, because the O’s want to work him back into action carefully.
“You take your chances with Soto and Cano there in the eighth and the ninth, because those guys have been unbelievable so far this year,” said Hyde, who was ejected by home plate umpire John Bacon in the third inning for arguing a third strike call on Westburg.
Hyde, by the way, was right about the call – Statcast had the called strike three low and in.
But, you don’t argue balls and strikes. That’s a no-no in baseball.
This, in case you were wondering, was what got Mike Elias in a lather, and kept him there.
Anyway.
Looks like we could have left early to start the trek back to the Valley, since our whole reason for staying was to see Bautista pitch a second straight day.
It’s hard for me to complain. I got a new sweatshirt out of the deal.
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Chris Graham
