Baltimore Orioles right the ship, take two-of-three from Toronto

You can’t con a con-man in a sense. The Baltimore Orioles came undone at the seams in Tuesday night’s loss to Toronto. That wasn’t going to happen in a second consecutive game. If anything, we saw some of those same characteristics from Toronto in last night’s 6-1 Orioles’ victory. How quickly things change.

Part of why what happened on Tuesday was so tough to watch was due to the fact that Chris Tillman looked so good. The same was true of Miguel Gonzalez last night, as he gave the Orioles about as solid of an effort as one could. Gonzalez’s line: 7.2 IP, 3 H, 1 R (unearned), 5 BB, 5 K. At one point in the second half of the game Gonzalez retired 14 straight hitters. When guys are being retired left and right, it’s tough for them to hurt you. 

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Courtesy of Evan Habeeb-USA TODAY Sports

Gonzalez pitched out of a potential “situation” in the first, when Toronto had two runners on. The Orioles opened up the last of the second with two consecutive walks, and for once it was the O’s who ended up making an opponent pay for that. David Lough sacrificed both runners into scoring position, and Caleb Joseph‘s two-RBI double gave the O’s a 2-0 lead.

Joseph would later score on a Machado RBI-double, and Machado would make the score 4-0 on Alejandro De Aza‘s RBI-double. Just for good measure, Jimmy Paredes would close out the inning with an RBI-single, giving the Orioles a 5-0 lead. The rest was all pitching, and thus all Miguel Gonzalez.

Gonzalez did get some help from the spry Manny Machado at the hot corner, who tagged out a runner off the bag on a fielder’s choice in the third. Kevin Pillar would score on a Caleb Joseph passed ball in the eighth, to account for Toronto’s lone run. However in the last of the eighth the Birds got that run back on Rey Navarro‘s first career home run at the big league level.

But ultimately when you’re mowing down the opposition left and right it’s tough for them to do much. 14 consecutive retired batters is pretty impressive. So from the ashes of Tuesday night’s loss, the Orioles rebounded and ended up taking two-of-three from their division rivals. If you can continue to take series’, you’ll find yourself in good shape.

There had been rumors for weeks around town to this effect, but yesterday the Orioles formally announced that the Angelos family was “making the stadium workers whole,” and compensating them with their normal salaries for the games missed due to the civil unrest. While it’s not necessarily popular to point out the virtues of a multi-millionaire, I do feel that this is something on the part of Peter Angelos that’s worthy of our praise as a society. He was under no obligation to pay those people, and in fact the Orioles themselves are one of the local businesses who lost money due to all of this.

It’s easy enough to say he can afford it, and so forth. That’s the snarky or petty way to look at it in a sense. But in this age of the bottom line being everything, here’s a businessman who cared more about his employees, their well-being, and that of their families, than how much he was making. Peter Angelos is an owner who gets a lot of criticism, some of it justified. But regardless of what you think of the guy, there’s no other way to describe this act but by saying that it’s a decent and commendable thing to do.