See what I did there?
Because the Orioles are the WORST on the WEST COAST!
Yeah.
I think the Baltimore heat is beginning to melt my brain, the Orioles’ lousy play over the long weekend certainly hasn’t helped matters. The Orioles followed up their feel-good four game winning streak with an equally abysmal four-game losing streak. The Orioles were swept out of Oakland and dropped game four yesterday to the Seattle Mariners.
Doug (If I see one more attempt at sly crude humor about his name I am going to scream) Fister made the O’s look silly yesterday pitching into the eighth inning and recording a season high nine strikeouts. It seemed as if he was ahead on every better and the Orioles’ bats were stymied for the fourth straight day. Jake Arrieta , trying to play stopper, had some rough luck in this game. He gave up two quick runs in the first but settled down for a strong second inning. In the third inning the wheels came off.
Ichiro led off with a sharp single that deflected off of Arrieta’s shin. After a visit from the trainers and manager Showalter Arrieta tried to tough it out. he gave up a seeing-eye single to Ryan and walked Smaok to load the bases. After getting a fly out he walked the next to batters and obviously had lost it. Simon came on to finish out the inning and provide some solid relief but the damage was done. The Orioles were down 4-1 by the end of the third and that is all the Mariners would need.
There were a couple highlights though. Mark Reynolds seems to be figuring it out, finally. He hit a monstrous upper-deck shot in the third to cut the lead to 2-1 at the time. The Orioles bullpen did a great job pitching 5.2 innings of scoreless relief to at least keep the Orioles in it long enough to mount a rally in the eighth.But it was all for naught.
The Orioles now sit four games under the .500 mark to which they fought so hard to get back. With two games left on this west coast swing they simply need to find a way to win the next two games. Coming home two games under .500 will feel a lot better than four or six games under .500.
Tonight the Orioles go up against former Oriole Erik Bedard working his way back into baseball after three years of injury-plagued seasons. Bedard has gotten off to a decent enough start this year but the Orioles need to solve him. They need to find a way to scratch out these next two wins.
Many people felt like the season was slipping away after the Long Hard Week that came with the losses to Boston, New York and Washington – but I did not have that feeling. But now, now I feel like the season may be slipping away from this team. The young pitching has been exposed, the lack of Brian Roberts is being exposed and Nick Markakis’ and Luke Scott’s struggles are beginning to become real problems as the season wears on.
There is still plenty of time to turn this around – and they need to start with these next two games.
Notes and errata
-More on Mark Reynolds. In May Reynolds is put up a .225/.361/.449/.881 line. Much more like the numbers we all expected from Reynolds. He is still walking a ton but the homers still aren’t really there. He hit five in May, with tonight’s game left, and while he is improving we still need to see more out of Reynolds. hopefully he can build off those numbers in June.
-Adam Jones did not start yesterday’s game sue to a sore shoulder. It is still unclear whether or not he will start tonight.
-Nick Markakis needs to get it going. He, like Reynolds, has had a better May but he only has four doubles all year and only four homers to match. One could write off April as being abnormally slow, but as May turns into June it is getting very disturbing seeing the lack of production from Nick. He and Roberts are cornerstones of this team and we are already down one.
