Team notes,
Baltimore Orioles
Reliever Darren O’Day strained his right hamstring while covering first base and was placed on the disabled list, but there was some doubt about whether he will be out only 15 days. While manager Buck Showal
ter was cautiously optimistic O’Day would be back when his DL time is up, the right-hander was not sure about that timetable. O’Day, an All-Star last season, said a hamstring injury affects his delivery.
“I’ll do whatever I can to be back as fast as I can,” said O’Day, who is 2-1 with a 3.15 ERA and two saves in 22 appearances. “Nobody will put a timeline on it, and I don’t need surgery, so that’s nice.”
Brad Brach and Mychal Givens will fill O’Day’s eighthinning role. Mike Wright was called up to take O’Day’s spot on the roster.
Going into this week, Baltimore relievers led the majors with 16 wins, their four losses were second fewest and their 2.81 ERA was the second lowest. Brach and Givens were tied for the major league lead with five wins as relievers.
First baseman Chris Davis became the third hitter with at least 100 career home runs at Oriole Park, joining Adam Jones and Rafael Palmeiro.
Boston Red Sox
Koji Uehara’s 4.57 ERA through Sunday is the highest it’s been this late in a season since he moved to the bullpen in 2010. The only time it was higher this season (4.91) was on April 18 after he gave up four runs in one-third of an inning against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Before this year, Uehara had a 1.86 ERA in three seasons with Boston, which helps explain why the Red Sox are confident Uehara, 41, can bounce back.
“We are very aware of his workload and number of pitches thrown,” Red Sox pitching coach
Carl Willis told MLB.com. “I don’t feel that there’s a fatigue factor involved. It’s just a mechanical thing and trust. It will get turned around in a hurry — I believe that.”
Dustin Pedroia has hit safely in 26 consecutive games against Toronto, dating to Sept. 7, 2014. That’s tied with Jerry Remy (1977-82) for the longest hitting streak against Toronto in history.
The Red Sox tied a franchise record when they gave up seven home runs in a 12-7 loss in the finale of a four-game set in Baltimore. All of the Orioles’ runs came on homers after they had failed to hit any in the first three games. The last time Red Sox pitchers gave up that many homers was Aug. 8, 2004, at the Detroit Tigers.
New York Yankees
Mark Teixeira, in the final year of his eight-year, $180 million contract, went on the disabled list for the fourth season in a row, this time because of a knee injury.
Although Teixeira, 36, has struggled at the plate this season (.180, three homers, 12 RBI), he has been solid defensively. Rookie Rob Refsnyder, who had never played first base, is splitting time at the position with Chris Par--
melee, who was called up from Class AAA instead of veteran Nick Swisher, general manager Brian Cashman said, because Parmelee had been performing better.
Dustin Ackley, who would have been an option to replace Teixeira, had season-ending shoulder surgery on the day Teixeira was injured. Greg Bird, the Yankees’ future first baseman, is out for the season after having offseason shoulder surgery.
“First base has a poison to it,” Cashman told the New York Post.
When Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran hit back-to-back home runs June 3, it was the second time since at least 1913 that Yankees teammates 39 or older homered in the same game — both in a span of nine days, both by Rodriguez and Beltran.
For the fifth consecutive season, a different Yankees reliever has successfully converted his first nine save opportunities: Rafael Soriano (nine in 2012), Mariano Rivera (18, 2013), David Robertson (nine, 2014), Andrew Miller (24, 2015) and Aroldis
Chapman (nine this year before blowing the save Sunday at Baltimore).
Tampa Bay Rays
After hitting .100 in April, Logan Morrison hit .351 in May and went 8-for-21 (.381) in his first five games in June with two doubles, four home runs, five runs scored and seven RBI.
“We made difficult decisions at the end of spring training for this club and this organization,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “I don’t know if he felt pressure about that early on. But whatever the reason he was scuffling, he scuffled. He kept his head up. Now he’s putting together a pretty solid season.”
Morrison’s four June home runs marked the first time he homered in three consecutive games since July 23-26, 2011, with the Miami Marlins.
“I always felt like I could do it, so it’s not like I feel like I’m being rewarded now because the results are happening,” Morrison told MLB.com.
Evan Longoria hit five home runs in the weekend series against the Minnesota Twins to become the third major leaguer to hit five homers in a single series this season (along with Mookie Betts of the Red Sox and Danny Valencia of the Oakland Athletics). It was the first time in Rays history a player homered in every game of a four-game series.
Toronto Blue Jays
The Blue Jays hoped moving Jose Bautista into the leadoff spot would provide a spark for their offense. Before that, Toronto was 19-23 (.452) and riding a five-game losing streak. In Bautista’s first 15 games after moving, Toronto went 11-4 (.734).
The previous time Bautista hit leadoff was June 15, 2010. While he might not be a prototypical leadoff hitter, he can work counts — he was averaging 4.26 pitches per plate appearance, good for eighth in the AL through Sunday, and was leading the league with 43 walks. Sunday at Fenway Park, he hit his second leadoff homer this season.
“He’ll get 11 to 13 more at-bats a month from that spot,” bench coach DeMarlo Hale said. “But the key is the bottom of the order has to get on base at least one time a game where he can hit with men on base. That’s the negative.”
In three of the last four games against the Red Sox, a Toronto starting pitcher has taken a no-hitter into the sixth inning — R.A. Dickey twice and Marco Estrada once.
“It’s one thing if you have one or two guys struggling and you shake the lineup up. But when you have five or six, there’s not a lot of shaking you can do.”
Yankees manager Joe Girardi on his struggling offense, which came into the week 14th in the American League in runs