You could almost feel it coming. “The Orioles are going to end up regretting not taking advantage of these scoring opportunities more.” There are games where I end up thinking this and still end up winning. And then there are games like this one, where heavy bullpen usage in the previous two games caught up with the O’s, Dillon Tate left to try to pitch most of the other inning while protecting a one-run lead in the eighth inning. , and he didn’t do it. The Orioles lost to the Rays, 4-3.
In any baseball game, there are hundreds of factors that determine whether a team wins or loses. Literally, every pitch changes the probability of a batter reaching base or not. Each swing or shot makes a small change. Each ball hit helps the batting team if the player reaches base, or helps the batting team if the player makes an out.
Some plays vary the percentage of expected victory more than others. Those are the ones that attract attention, and it is understandable. Tate is kind of a hard-luck loser here. Forced to finish the seventh inning after Cole Irvin ran out of gas in an excellent start, Tate got two outs and made that part of his job.
On another day, Jacob Webb or Yennier Canó could have pitched the eighth, but Webb was needed for several innings yesterday and Canó pitched two in a row. Then, Tate also went out for the eighth.
If you want to be generous with Tate, you could say that bad luck struck him when 4-5 Rays hitters Isaac Paredes and Amed Rosario reached back-to-back singles. Paredes had an exit velocity of 73.6 mph and Rosario had an exit velocity of 85.1 mph. Those are cheap. Or, if you don’t want to be generous, you can notice that Tate’s sinker wasn’t sinking and that these two singles were hit on balls that were in the middle-middle of the strike zone.
The next batter, José Siri, bunted on the first three pitches. Tate missed the strike zone two of three times, and eventually there was a 3-1 count and Siri stopped trying to tap. Tate’s fifth pitch, a better sinker than either of the other two hits but still not very good, was fired into the gap in right-center, an easy two-run double that turned a 3-2 lead into the Orioles to a 4-3 lead. deficit.
That’s a big late-inning swing. Using win probability, this was +36% toward the Rays winning the game. Tate was pitching in the situation out of necessity and didn’t take advantage of his opportunity.
Based on win probability, this wasn’t actually the Orioles’ worst play in the game. That’s because in the next half inning, in the bottom of the eighth, the O’s were able to load the bases. At the beginning of the inning, Ramón Urías was hit by a pitch on his foot. Gunnar Henderson added a walk with one out.
Adley Rutschman followed with the hit the Orioles needed, except that with a no longer fast Urías as the lead runner and with Urías taking the HBP on his foot to reach base, Rutschman’s line drive single to shallow left field was not enough to score. the tying race. This was the latest what if in a game that was full of them.
Folks, you may not believe it, but it’s true: After Rutschman’s hit, the Orioles were the favorites to win the game. A home team that trails by one run in the eighth inning but with the bases loaded and one out is a 54.9% favorite. The tying run could score on a fly ball. Multiple runs could be scored on a hit with one or two outs. A wild pitch or fielding error of some kind could occur. There are many possibilities.
Ryan Mountcastle, a right-handed hitter who got the lead against Rays reliever Garrett Cleavinger, came to the plate for this opportunity with the bases loaded. Mountcastle had a .942 OPS against lefties coming into this game. The opportunity to cause real damage was there. Well, he did hurt the Orioles’ chances of winning. Mountcastle swung at the first pitch, a slider that was below the strike zone, and turned into an easy 5-4-3 double play. That’s hard. The probability of winning for the O’s fell to 15.8%, which is a subtraction of 39.1%.
(Note to Orioles sufferers and would-be sufferers: Yes, that’s the same Cleavinger who was selected by the Orioles in the third round of the 2015 Draft and ultimately traded, along with Hyun Soo Kim, for Jeremy Hellickson. The Former Oriole Shawn Armstrong also pitched one inning out of the Rays bullpen, allowing two hits but no runs).
Henderson hit a leadoff home run at Eutaw Street and the Orioles lost. Henderson was on base five times and stole a base and the Orioles lost. The Orioles had 15 hits, including three by Henderson and three by Rutschman, and lost. Cole Irvin allowed just two runs in a 6.1-inning start, giving the beleaguered bullpen the rest it needed, and the team lost.
This was a difficult question. The Orioles are not immune to tough losses even with their winning percentage. They make mistakes and bad things happen to them. The only run allowed to Irvin was an unlucky run. In the fifth inning, Irvin, pitching from a 3-0 cushion, allowed a one-out hit to Rays #8 hitter José Caballero.
Tampa’s backup catcher Alex Jackson, who before today was hitting a massive 1-for-34 for the season, hit a hard liner almost exactly to Urías, who came in to play third base after replacing Mateo. This ball was perhaps not even the width of a baseball to Uriah’s left. He misjudged the rebound and zoomed into left field. Caballero moved to third and Jackson went to first.
The scorer initially called this an error, although a hit was scored at the end of the game. I agree with the scorer’s initial instinct here: If you’re a major league infielder hitting with a .602 OPS, you better make plays like that in the field. Urias took a page from Ryan McKenna’s playbook on this one. The result was that the Rays got their first run with a sacrifice fly.
Another game hypothesis is that Irvin had a low enough pitch count through six innings that he could have been expected to go seven. The Orioles tried to make this happen, but Caballero hurt them again, leading off the top of the seventh with a home run off Walltimore to make the score 3-2. Irvin needed six pitches to get the next batter out and Brandon Hyde decided that was enough. It was worth a try. The game might have turned out better if Irvin had punted the seventh and Tate had only had to pitch the eighth. We can only imagine it.
The series victory was already in the books with Saturday’s victory. The Orioles just failed to sweep with Sunday’s loss. It was frustrating. I think, as I often do, of one of Earl Weaver’s famous lines: “On my tombstone, he simply writes: The most sore loser that ever lived.” There’s a lot to be angry about here, and it will be even more painful if the Yankees win on the West Coast.
The double blessing and curse of baseball is that there is usually another game the next day. The Orioles travel to Toronto for a four-game series that begins Monday. Grayson Rodriguez and Kevin Gausman are the starting pitchers listed for the 7:07 opener. The Blue Jays are a sub-.500 team and I hope the Orioles treat them that way in these four games.
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