May has been Ruiz’s month to flourish
CLEVELAND — Rio Ruiz, the Orioles’ hottest hitter in May, has found that all those hitting coaches who preach consistency and routine just might be onto something.
With a home run in the Orioles’ loss to the Cleveland Indians on Thursday, Ruiz had hits in nine of his 11 games this month, giving him a .324 batting average with a .906 OPS in May and raising his season average to .256 — the highest it’s been since the first weekend of the year.
He’s found building a pregame routine that works for him with hitting coach Don Long and assistant hitting coach Howie Clark has been the key.
“I get here, I eat, do what I’ve got to do as far as the training room, stretching out, lifting if I’ve got to lift,” Ruiz said. “Then I go straight to the cage. I usually go to the cage about an hour, hour [and] 10 minutes before stretch for BP and get all my stuff in. That’s about it. I try to get here at the same time every day, and that’s about it. Something so small turned into something big.”
If it doesn’t sounds groundbreaking, that’s because it isn’t. Every major leaguer and minor leaguer has a routine of some sort.
“It’s the kind of things that if I’m not on that schedule, I feel off,” Ruiz said.
July 12: MASN arguments
A New York judge has set July 12 for oral arguments in the long-running dispute between the Washington Nationals and Orioles over money from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, the cable channel they jointly own.
Supreme Court Justice Joel M. Cohen on Friday accepted the schedule proposed by the teams.
The Nationals want Cohen to confirm an April 15 decision by Major League Baseball’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee awarding the Nationals nearly $100 million, or about $20 million a year, in additional rights fees for 2012 through 2016.
The Orioles asked Cohen to put the matter on hold until the New York Court of Appeals hears their challenge to a New York Supreme Court Appellate Division decision in 2017 that sent the dispute back to the RSDC for a rehearing.