Orioles 7, Blue Jays 4: And Yet It Was Never Nearly That Close

 

that's thirty-year-old rookie Rudy Martin Jr. to the right,
called up in the wake of the Jésus Sanchez DFA
(he seemed really nice but, alas, stopped catching
[and also sort of hitting])

We all remember Chris Bassitt, right? A three-year stalwart of the Blue Jays rotation who selflessly pitched crucial innings out of the bullpen as part of last year's miracle run to the World Series? One of five Blue Jays pitchers to allow a single run in the ill-fated eleven-inning Game Seven of that very same series? One among the relative few pitchers to wear a glove with a modified-trapeze web, far and away the most æsthetic of all baseball glove webs? (I admit that this last point will be invisible to all but the true baseball-glove sicko [it is okay if you haven't noticed that we are living in a baseball glove golden age right now but we completely are.]) Well, there he was, Chris Bassitt, pitching for the Orioles Friday night! And he pitched well (two runs over five), not that he especially needed to, given his old pal Max Scherzer's disastrous second inning, in which the O's scored five runs on, among other things, six straight hits (that's actually so many hits to happen all in a row). Homers from both Kazuma Okamoto and, later, Brett Bateman (his first! he's been so great! he is already the best part of the Kevin Gausman trade! isn't that weird!) gave the final score the appearance of a much more competitive game than this one ever really felt like after that brutal five-run second. The Friday night crowd was a little better about it all than you might expect, with many more chanting "Vladdy" in encouragement than the few lightly booing his groundouts, but it it was a dispiriting affair; there's no getting around it. This one-sided loss, coupled with the news that Saturday's game is scheduled as a "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti-heavy bullpen day now that Dylan Cease is being given an extra day of rest (his velocity is noticeably down as we near the end of the long season [hey: mine too, man]), doesn't make for a super cheerful start to the weekend. It of course remains true, however, that you never know. 

KS