Friday, August 27, 2021
Phoenix Rising, For One Night in Baltimore
Over the entrance to old Memorial Stadium, it saluted Baltimore's war fallen: "Time Will Not Dim The Glory of Their Deeds." Over the entrance to Camden Yards, the temptation Wednesday night was powerful enough to hang a sign reading "Deed." Singular.
This is how badly the Orioles wanted to snap their losing streak before it arrived into the Terrible Twenties: Catcher Austin Wynns had sage shipped to Camden Yards, which he and first baseman Trey Mancini paraded around the park before the game. Mancini bragged about his freshly-grown superstition mustache, and center fielder Cedric Mullins went the opposite way and shaved his beard.
You'll do anything to break the spell. If you'd seen assorted Orioles conducting a clubhouse seance asking for kind permission to address Frank Robinson in the Elysian Fields, you wouldn't have been terribly shocked — though you might have expected Robinson to pass the line to any St. Louis Browns who happened to be eavesdropping.
That was 1988: Robinson took over the Orioles as manager six games into a 21-game losing streak. Shortly before the streak ended, he showed a visitor a fan gave him in sympathy, saying, "It's been lovely, but I have to scream now."
This was Wednesday night: the Orioles entered with the sixth-lowest season's winning percentage of any team in franchise history. Of the other five, four were Browns ... and one was the sadder-sack 2018 Orioles. The last thing these Birds wanted was to continue like cooked geese.
They finally put superstition, supernatural, and extraterrestrial to one side and decided the only way to do it was to play baseball. When Angels third baseman David Fletcher flied out to deepest right field in the top of the ninth Wednesday night, the ballpark audience already on its feet roaring let out a scream as though their Woe-rioles had just won the seventh game of the World Series.
That's what ending a 19-game winning streak with a 10-6 win — one night after the Angels bludgeoned the Orioles, 14-8 — does for a crowd maybe half of whom actually came to the park to see the Angels' two-way star Shohei Ohtani. As if they were half conceding the game before Orioles opener Chris Ellis threw his first pitch of the evening.
That's what prying, pushing, and pounding a 5-run eighth out of the Angels' bullpen does, an inning after it looked as though the Orioles wasted their best chance to overthrow the Angels for good.
That's what shoving back after an early 2-run lead turned to a still-too-early 4-run deficit closed back up to a pair does. That's what playing in the end like anything but a team designed explicitly to go into the tank for who knows how long does, too.
That's also what knowing damn well you need to atone for one of the least-timely wasted outs of the season when you have only six outs left to play with, which is just what the Orioles in the eighth had to do about the seventh. Two on, nobody out, is the time to shove with your shoulder, not nudge with your hip.
Damn lucky for the Orioles that they had an eighth-inning push, shove, and mind over matter with a pair of bases-loaded walks setting up a bigger shove and a punctuation mark to nail the win that would keep them short of the gates of infamy for the time being. They haven't joined the 20+ loss in a row club occupied ignominiously by the 1961 Phillies (23), the 1988 Orioles (21), the 1969 Expos (20), the 1943 and 1916 A's (20 each), or the 1906 Boston Americans (20).
Yet.
But when Orioles manager Brandon Hyde ordered Wynns to sacrifice with Jahmei Jones (leadoff single) on second and Victor Gutierrez (plunked) on first, jaws should have dropped. And Hyde should have had his hide tanned. Why not reach for Jorge Mateo — hitting .356 as a part-timer — to pinch-hit for Wynns and take over at shortstop the rest of the game, while inserting Pedro Severino behind the plate, when you might get a 2-run base hit out of Mateo?
Oops. Wynns dropped his bunt right back to the box. The Orioles merely closed the deficit to a single run. They had a lot to atone for in the eighth.
Lucky for them Mancini greeted Angels reliever Jake Petricka with a base hit up the pipe. Lucky for them that Anthony Santander — he taking the American League's best OPS in August into the game — doubled to the right field corner almost promptly for second and third. Lucky for them, Petricka and the Angels decided to hand D.J. Stewart first on the house to load the pads.
Lucky for them Jose Urias and, one out later, Gutierrez caught Petricka unable to find the strike zone if he'd sent out a surveillance mission, sending Mancini and Santander strolling home with the tying and go-ahead runs. Very lucky for them pinch hitter Austin Hays introduced himself rudely to Petricka's relief James Hoyt with a double off the left field fence, and that Mullins greeted yet another Angel bull, Sam Selman, with a sacrifice fly to left.
That all had to be far more satisfying than Mullins hitting Ohtani's first pitch of the bottom of the first over the center field fence, or Santander sending an 0-1 fastball into the right field bleachers two outs later. Or, Stewart following Satander's leadoff single in the bottom of the fourth with a blast over the left field fence.
The crash carts stayed on double red alert when the Angels tied at two with rookie Brandon Marsh lining a 2-run single down the right field line. But after Marsh got thrown out stealing with Adell at the plate, and Juan Lagares lining out for the side, the game suddenly looked like a question of who'd outplay their own mistakes better.
When the Angels took the 6-2 lead in the fourth, it looked like the answer would be them. Ellis's evening ended when Jared Walsh hit his inning-opening meatball into the right field bleachers. Reliever Marcos Diplan carried a 1.80 ERA over his past seven days in from the Oriole bullpen. Jose Iglesias was so unimpressed he whacked a double into the right field corner. Stassi was even less impressed, letting Diplan fail to find the strike zone even with a GPS and taking a leisurely walk up to first.
Up came Marsh, who resembles a young man with the life ambition to star in any future reboot of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. He cared about Diplan's impressive week's ERA the least, sending his first career home run over the left center field fence. Making him the sixth Angel to hit his premiere Show bomb in Camden Yards.
"I'm rooting for the Orioles to lose two more games," tweeted an Oriole fan, "not because I don't like them, but because at this point it's like, why not go for the history books?"
"There was tension in our dugout, there was pressure," Hyde told reporters after the game. "Everybody was on the top step. "Our guys just really wanted this one. We're tired of hearing, tired of seeing it on TV. Everybody's tired of it."
"It's electric in there," Mullins said of the post-game clubhouse, after Wells got Fletcher to hit the game-ending fly out and took a hug with (read carefully) ninth-inning catching insertion Severino, while their mates celebrated more casually on the playing field than the fans in the stands.
Conner Greene relieved Diplan after ball one to Lagares and got rid of him, Ohtani, and Fletcher almost in a blink. On a night the Orioles couldn't afford too many blinks. As if to remind his mates, Stewart followed Satander's leadoff single in the bottom of the fourth with his own launch over the left center field fence. And Greene kept the Angels quiet in the top of the fifth.
Yet another Oriole bull, Cole Susler, shook Marsh's leadoff single off in the top of the sixth to lure Adell into forcing him out at second before striking Lagares and Ohtani out swinging. At minimum, the Orioles might at least brag that they sent Ohtani's season ERA up to three after five full innings.
Dillon Tate picked up where Susler left off in the Los Angeles seventh. Oriole fan kept telling him- or herself that a 2-run deficit wasn't equal to trying to climb the Transamerica Tower in beach sandals. Tate shook a 2-out walk (to Walsh) off and lured Iglesias into an inning-ending ground out to third. Nine outs left to close and overcome.
Tate got rid of Stassi on an inning-opening ground out in the top of the eighth, then yielded to Tanner Scott. Scott struck Marsh out and got Adell to ground out to third. Swift enough inning. The Orioles still had six outs to play with, with three reasonably loaded weapons — Mancini, Santander, and Stewart — due up in the bottom of the eighth.
Wynns ought to buy Hays chateaubriand for dinner for the rest of the year, after Hays performed his penance for that seventh-inning bunt. The Orioles might want to send Ohtani a bottle of wine — Wednesday was the first time any team hit two or more home runs off him in the same game.
"These guys have dealt with a lot," said Hyde. "Call it rebuilding or what you want, but it's not fun to lose. You want to show your fans that the big league club is going to be fun to watch and there's pieces coming. That's what's been disappointing."
What's the difference between the 1988 Orioles and this year's model? Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic asked and answered a few days earlier: the '88 Orioles were at least trying. They had two future Hall of Famers, a few former all-stars, and a Hall of Fame outfielder who'd been ornery as a player but developed an amazing sense of the absurd as a skipper.
Told that a local disc jockey would stay on the air until his Orioles finally won a game, Robinson deadpanned, "We're gonna kill the poor guy." His players developed gallows humor to endure. Spotting a writer new on the Oriole beat, one of their Hall of Famers, Cal Ripken, Jr., beckoned him over: "Join the hostages."
This year's Orioles have committed few good deeds and inflicted excess punishment — on their fans. Oriole jokes run rampant. (The Orioles can't use the Internet — they can't put three Ws together!)
This year's model has a couple of former all-stars turned reclamation projects that look one day like stickers and the next like the Orioles can't wait for someone else to re-claim them. Though even they might be hard pressed to figure out why.
Even the in-season retirement of Chris Davis, bombardier turned walking deadman for too long, too sadly, too lacking for knowledge as to what really happened and why, didn't leave room for a change in fortune.
The Orioles have been in the tank since the 2016 wild card game. "I can sit here and tell you ten things you may not know about that situation, but nobody wants to hear it," then-manager Buck Showalter still insisted four years later. "I'm at peace with that."
Oriole fans (yes, there remain Oriole fans) may never be at peace with Showalter absolutely refusing to bring in the best relief pitcher of 2016 with two on, one out, and Edwin Encarnacion due to check in at the plate in the bottom of the 11th — because Zack Britton doesn't come in unless, you know, the Orioles have a lead to protect. The Gospel According to Blind Managers Needing a Stopper Five Seconds Ago.
So Showalter left Ubaldo Jimenez in. And Encarnacion left the Orioles behind when his three-run homer sailed into Rogers Centre's second deck. Showalter's still at peace with that? He's lucky Earl Weaver didn't throw lightning bolts down on his head from the Elysian Fields.
The Orioles decided the only way to get back to greatness from there was to go in the tank. They finished dead last in the American League East in three of the four seasons to follow, a fourth-place finish breaking the monotony. They're 201-345 over the span. They also fired Showalter after their 47-115, fire-sale accented 2018. As if it was Showalter's idea to go tanking the night away.
"The sport is cyclical," Rosenthal wrote. "Teams, especially those with lower revenues, occasionally must rebuild. From 2012 to '16, the Orioles won more regular-season games than any team in the American League. They were bound to regress. But even Major League Baseball is now implicitly acknowledging that some teams go too far in what Tony Clark, the head of the Players Association, once called 'the race to the bottom'."
It won't do to point to two more low-revenue teams and notice six trips to the postseason in the past nine years (a tip of the beak, Athletics) or six in the past 13 including a pair of World Series appearances. (Greetings, Rays.) Those two teams have established front office brains. Orioles general manager Mike Elias came in in 2018 — when Dan Duquette was executed after the season — with the Orioles tying one hand behind his back to open.
His own career having begun covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Evening Sun during that '88 losing streak (was he the one Ripken invited to join the hostages?), Rosenthal points to Elias's predecessor Dan Duquette stripping the major league roster with trades that haven't proven successful yet, if they ever will.
The Orioles' 10-thumbed ownership left Elias to spend his first few seasons on baseball's version of poverty row. The team's international and analytics departments need either a booster or an overhaul. These Orioles may also have the number two farm system at this writing, but they have the pitching depth of a match book up and down the organization.
What a long, strange trip it's been for an organization that boasts seven men (Murray, Ripken, Brooks and Frank Robinson, Jim Palmer, Mike Mussina, and longtime manager Earl Weaver) wearing Orioles hats on their Hall of Fame plaques.
These Orioles, as Rosenthal says, should be hoisted as Exhibit A in the Tanking Hall of Shame. They're the number one argument that tanking needs to be stopped, once and for all, that those who own major league franchises have an obligation to make their best efforts to put a competitive product on the field. Even modestly-endowed franchises can and have been known in the past to retool/remake/rebuild on the fly while continuing to keep competing.
It's unhealthy for baseball when one of its formerly model franchises stands as the lead argument against what Rosenthal calls "owners perpetuat[ing] their rebuilding myths, getting away with lower payrolls and the losing that comes with them, knowing many fans will raise nary a whimper, wanting to see only the best in their favorite teams."
Tanking is fan abuse and unworthy of the game. Even Oriole fans know the difference between this year's model and the team that opened 1988 0-21 is that that team, at least, wasn't deliberately built to tank.
On Wednesday night, this year's Orioles, built to tank well before this year's sorry losing streak, played and stood above and beyond. They played like ... anybody but the Orioles. Sure they caught a few breaks and damn near wrecked their own cause themselves late. But they took fair advantage of the breaks they caught, atoned for their self-near-ruination in fine style, and looked for once in their lives like something resembling their well-storied forebears.
The Orioles became a phoenix for one night. For the first time in 19 games, and maybe all season long, these built-for-failure Orioles found a way to play better than the way they were built.