Orioles 6, Blue Jays 5: About As Much Fun As You Will Have Watching Baseball On A Saturday Afternoon Until Right At The End There, Probably

 

would that these Yards were a Time Yards

It is a minor miracle that Trey Yesavage managed to work around seven walks—seven of them!—to allow just the one run in five innings of work in which he simply did not have it (in which "it" could be read as either his command, generally, or his splitter at all, specifically). But he did! Three double-plays on groundballs in three innings (one of them on an exceedingly nifty 5-3 play started by Kazuma Okamoto) is by no means the kind of thing anyone can ever count on, but sometimes the fates are kind. Other times, they are unremittingly cruel, as when Jeff Hoffman, given the ninth after Louis Varland had been called in for the eighth against a tougher portion of the Orioles lineup, got absolutely cooked for five runs to lose the game in walk-off fashion. Never mind that it was Connor Seabold who came on for the final batters (a walk to Rutchman, the single to big Pete Alonso); those were all very much Hoffman's runners, and all five of those runs entirely his. It was just the worst! And there had been so much fun before that, too, as the Blue Jays built their four-run lead, in no small part owing to Vladdy's four-for-five day (with a double and two runs scored), which brings his average back up to .305, and his OBA (I am considering becoming fussy about calling things percentages when they are not expressed as percentages, and "OBA" is a longstanding alternative appellation!) to a robust-as-all-heck .400, and his OPS just a tick below the A- mark at .794. Just a real stinker of an ending to this one, you'd have to say! And yet, in a sense, fair enough, given the way things went for the Orioles the night before. If we win tomorrow, that's three-and-one in Baltimore, and you'd take that every time. The split would sting a little after today, though, I think. I guess we'll just see.   

KS