NEW YORK — As the old saying goes, over the course of a 162-game season, each team wins 54 games, loses 54 games and the remaining 54 could go either way.
On Thursday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, the Baltimore Orioles absolutely lost a game.
In the Yankees’ 10-5 win over Baltimore, the Orioles coughed up four basically free runs in a fifth inning from hell, serving their AL East rival a lead on a silver platter. The Yankees, who were down 2-0 after three lazy innings, happily devoured it.
The bottom of the fifth began with a throwing error by Baltimore third baseman Kelvin Gutierrez. Normally, a team can maneuver around a leadoff error without much issue. But when you’re the Orioles, a team staring down the barrel at their fourth 100-loss season in the last four full seasons, things like that tend to snowball into something much, much worse.
Letting Tim Locastro — already one of the fastest men in cleats — reach base on an error is a great way to start an unraveling. Sure enough, Locastro sped around the bases for the Yankees’ first run when Marwin Gonzalez, a fellow member of the bench mob, smacked an RBI double. Shortstop Jorge Mateo booted a ball later in the inning that should have been the second out, but instead placed runners at the corners for the scary part of the Yankees’ lineup.
You’ll never guess what happened next.
Aaron Judge, Anthony Rizzo and Giancarlo Stanton poked three consecutive singles. Judge’s could have been ruled an error on former Yankee Rougned Odor, but perhaps the official scorer was feeling a bit too cruel already. When the dust settled, the Yankees had a 4-2 lead, all on unearned runs.
With the Yankees’ domineering bullpen, the rest of the game was a cinch. Miguel Castro, Wandy Peralta, Jonathan Loaisiga and Chad Green relieved Jameson Taillon without allowing any Orioles to touch home plate. Meanwhile, the Yankees added on in the sixth inning thanks to, you guessed it, another Orioles’ error.
This one was by pitcher Mike Baumann. The right-handed reliever threw a truly ridiculous 103.4-mph pitch earlier in the game, but his ill-advised throw to first on a Locastro comebacker in the sixth inning ended up by the dugout. The error let Joey Gallo move up to third. Gallo scooted home on a sac fly one batter later, further widening the gap between the Yankees and O’s, both literally and figuratively. After a wild pitch and a three-run round tripper from Judge in the bottom of the eighth, that gap had become the Mariana Trench.
For Taillon, this certainly was not a game to write home about. Still, he limited damage well, and thanks to shrewd bullpen management by Aaron Boone, the Yankees weren’t totally sunk by Taillon lasting just 4 2/3 innings. Orioles’ starter Bruce Zimmermann was even better than Taillon, but like his counterpart, he was also pulled before finishing five innings. Zimmermann struck out five and kept the Yankees scoreless through the first four innings before his defense revolted against him.
Ron Marinaccio did give the visitors two ninth-inning runs as a treat, but the only difference they made was in the youngster’s ERA. The Yankees have now won six in a row heading into another winnable series in Kansas City. The two straight sweeps have seen the Yankees win in a start-to-finish blowout (Sunday’s 10-2 romp over Cleveland), come back to win on a walk-off (Saturday’s trash-filled bonanza), and with Thursday’s game now in the books, they’ve also won ugly.
All the wins count the same, though, and a 13-6 record looks pretty good, even if it is just 11% of the season. This week’s trio of wins against the Orioles are not ones that fans will remember after the season, but they’re certainly the type that can boost the Yankees’ record as they vie for playoff position.
Even better for the Yankees, they have 13 more games left with the birds from Baltimore.
