NO PROBLEM
Life has been so charmed for the Orioles in the past few days that on Thursday they chased one of baseball’s best pitchers with a weather report.
They followed that up with a 5-2 win over the Texas Rangers without hitting one long ball — the Orioles’ first homerless victory since April 26 — to secure a four-game sweep at Camden Yards for the first time since 2008.
The offense was paced by a career-best four-hit effort from a guy they released in April, allowing the Orioles to improve to 4-0 while playing one hitter short because of Manny Machado’s five-game suspension.
There’s no truth to the rumor that the entire Orioles team ran with scissors on their way to the charter plane that took them to Boston early this morning.
You couldn’t blame them for tempting fate, though, after finishing off a sweep Thursday night with a game that seemingly wasn’t supposed to be played. Weather reports all day pointed toward constant rain all night; the first pitch was delayed for 56 minutes.
In fact, the Rangers didn’t receive word that they would be playing until about 7:30 p.m., and fearing that they would have only a brief window before the rain
came pouring again, they decided to scratch their ace, Yu Darvish, and save him for tonight against the New York Mets. Texas didn’t want to waste Darvish for a game that might not last more than a few innings.
Of course, it didn’t rain at all Thursday evening after the first pitch, and the bone-dry announced 24,535 enjoyed another Orioles win over the struggling Rangers (37-48).
The Orioles (46-39) are seven games over .500 for the first time this season as they head to Fenway Park for a three-game series against the Boston Red Sox that begins this afternoon.
And with Toronto’s 4-1 loss Thursday night to the Oakland Athletics, the Orioles move into a tie with the Blue Jays for first place in the American League East.
Despite losing three of four to the Tampa Bay Rays, the Orioles ended up 7-4 in the 11-game homestand against the Rangers, Rays and Chicago White Sox, three sub-.500 teams.
They’ve won six of seven against the Rangers this year and swept Texas in a four-game series in Baltimore for the first time since August 2004. The Orioles hadn’t swept a four-game series at home since 2008 against the Seattle Mariners and a four-game sweep anywhere since 2011 in Minnesota.
Perhaps it would have been different if Darvish (8-4, 2.42 ERA) had started instead of long reliever Scott Baker, who had a 5.80 ERA in 11 previous games. Baker, a former Minnesota Twins starter who sat out most of last season after elbow surgery, was 6-0 with a 2.13 ERA in nine previous games against the Orioles. It was the longest active winning streak against the Orioles (Joe Saunders had been 7-0 before losing Monday).
And Baker (0-2) did his part for a while. He kept the Orioles off the board until the third when the unbelievably torrid Steve Pearce singled home Nick Hundley to break a scoreless tie. It was Pearce’s second hit of the evening, giving him 12 multi-hit games in his past 22 contests.
Pearce kept it going in the fifth with an RBI double that gave the Orioles a 3-2 lead, and then singled and scored in the seventh. The four hits set a career high for Pearce, who is 23-for-59 (.390 average) with six homers and eight doubles in his past 15 games.
Pearce almost didn’t get the chance for an RBI in the fifth. With Hundley on third — Hundley had doubled in Ryan Flaherty to tie the game at 2 — Baker threw a high fastball that traveled to the backstop and allowed Hundley to score. With the play initially ruled a wild pitch, the umpiring crew gathered and changed it to a foul ball. There was no official challenge, and replays clearly showed the ball ricocheting off Pearce’s bat.
So Hundley returned to third and Pearce got another opportunity — and he doubled into the left-center gap. Two batters later, Baker was pulled, allowing three runs on seven hits and one intentional walk in 42⁄ innings.
The Orioles scored twice more in the seventh on a sacrifice fly by Adam Jones and an RBI single by Chris Davis.
The club broke its homer streak of 12 straight games and multiplehomer streak of six consecutive games. Since May 1, it had homered in all of its 33 wins before Thursday.
The extra runs cemented the win for starter Wei-Yin Chen (8-3). He matched Baker initially, throwing three scoreless before yielding his first run in the fourth. Adrian Beltre singled to lead off the inning, moved to third on Chris Gimenez’s one-out double and then scored on a groundout by Carlos Pena. Chen limited the damage by getting a pop-up to end the inning.
The Rangers took the lead against Chen in the fifth on a solo homer by Shin-Soo Choo, who has homered in each of the games in which he has faced Chen in his career.
It continued a disturbing trend for Chen, who has allowed seven homers in his past four games and 13 in his past nine after serving up just three long balls in his first eight starts of the season.
But the lefty didn’t make another mistake, allowing just six hits, two walks and two runs while striking out four in six innings. It was his first quality start since June 16 at Tampa Bay.
The bullpen again didn’t give up a run, with closer Zach Britton picking up his 12th save in 14 chances with a scoreless ninth.