Making themselves right at home again
Bronx Bombers continue Camden Yards win streak
It was perhaps the most 2020 of baseball games.
A contest scheduled to last seven innings went nine anyway. Both managers put their designated hitters into the field as their benches thinned. A pitcher avoided a walk-off loss in the bottom of an inning, started the next frame automatically at second base and scored the go-ahead run off a pitcher who eventually made his way to second base and scored, too.
But in the end, it was much like most other games between the Orioles and New York Yankees, with Baltimore falling 6-5 in the first game of Friday’s doubleheader. It marked the Orioles’ 19th straight loss to their American League East foe and 18th straight defeat against the Yankees at Camden Yards.
The latter is tied for the secondlongest road winning streak in history. The Orioles (16-21) tried to keep the Yankees from matching the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers’ 19 consecutive road wins over the Cincinnati Reds in the night’s second game.
As a result of rule changes for the
2020 season, both the eighth and ninth — officially an extra-inning with doubleheader games this year having only seven innings of regulation — began with a runner automatically at second. After both New York and Baltimore wasted their opportunities in the eighth, Yankees reliever Jonathan Holder opened the ninth on second base and scored on a single by Miguel Andújar, who scored New York’s second run of the frame off Baltimore’s Travis Lakins Sr.
With Anthony Santander leaving the game with an apparent injury after striking out to end the eighth, Lakins took his spot in the order and began the bottom of the ninth at second. He scored when Renato Núñez grounded into a double play, but it was the only run the Orioles’ scored in the ninth as they were 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position.