The Orioles had their chances and they blew it. The season is over.
It’s over. The 2024 Orioles season is officially in the past tense forever. A season that started out full of excitement and hope and morphed into one full of confusion, frustration, and disappointment reached a quick postseason end. The O’s, after earning home field advantage in the best-of-three wild card series, did not bring any offense to the party. They shuffle into the offseason on the heels of a 2-1 defeat at the hands of the Royals.
One image stands out above all others as representative of the loss not just in this game but of the series as well. In the fifth inning, having tied the game at 1-1, the Orioles went on to load the bases with no one out. Scoring chances do not get any better than this. There are any number of ways to get a productive out. The batter at the plate when there’s no one out could even ground into a double play and as long as one of the outs isn’t recorded at home plate, a run still scores.
The post-June 2024 Orioles find other ways to make memories. Batting with one out in this situation, Colton Cowser found himself in a 1-2 count after three pitches against Royals reliever Angel Zerpa. A lefty reliever, Zerpa is a tough matchup for Cowser, but even so: The fourth pitch came high and inside and hit Cowser in the hand. That’s good, right? The bases are loaded and the batter is hit by the pitch. A run is forced in.
Except: In the process of this absolutely unhittable pitch coming in and hitting Cowser, he swung at the pitch. He was swinging the whole way and the pitch hit him. That’s not a hit by pitch. It’s a strikeout. No one advances. Cowser may never again in his career bat in such an impactful position, and if he does, everyone will remember the time that he swung at the pitch and hit him. It was the most stupid and agonizing of possible outcomes, and thus entirely on brand for the 2024 Orioles.
In a happier, make-a-movie-of-it version of events, Cowser, given wings by the presence of the understudy for Daisy who he saw in The Great Gatsby on Broadway. The actress, Kayla Pecchioni, performed the national anthem before the game and met Cowser during the pregame on-field availability. It’s the dough of a ready-made fun story. All the Orioles had to do was bake it. They forgot to turn the oven on. I think this metaphor got lost. Sorry.
Here’s the thing: Cowser struck out on the pitch that hit him. After the game, the Orioles announced that Cowser has a hand fracture. Before Cowser’s at-bat, Anthony Santander, probably also swinging for a grand slam, popped out to the infield. After Cowser made an out by swinging at a pitch that broke his hand, Adley Rutschman grounded out to the shortstop, Bobby Witt Jr., who had to make a modestly-impressive play to throw out the catcher-speed Rutschman and end the inning.
Again, all of this happened when the game was knotted 1-1. In the very next half inning, the top of the sixth, the Royals took the lead again. It went like this. Cionel Pérez came in with one out and the bases empty. Royals #8 hitter Kyle Isbel hit a Baltimore chop for a single. Pérez struck out Maikel Garcia to get a second out. The third out was elusive. Second baseman Michael Massey reached below the strike zone and golfed a blooper into no man’s land in the outfield. Isbel took third base on the play.
Pérez was relieved by Yennier Cano, because manager Brandon Hyde was serious about all hands being on deck. The Orioles used six relievers in the game after starter Zach Eflin labored through four innings and the O’s chose not to push him through the lineup a third time.
Cano’s first batter? It had to be Witt. There are those in Birdland who wanted the intentional walk yesterday as Witt batted with a man on third. Hyde trusted Cano to get something on the ground that the Orioles could use to escape the inning. On a 1-1 count, Cano made his pitch and Witt ripped it hard, just to the right of Jordan Westburg. The O’s second baseman dove and got the ball in his glove, but did not see Gunnar Henderson charging hard to field the throw for the force at second base. He steadied himself and threw to first instead, where he could not retire the speedy Witt.
The second, decisive run scored and that was, effectively, the ballgame, the series, and the season. Ought the Orioles have walked Witt? Well, no, but I understand the temptation to feel that way.
Two ground balls to second base defined a lot of the game. The Orioles had two men on in the fourth inning when Ryan O’Hearn hit a soft ground ball that headed for the middle of the field. Massey ranged far, dove fielded it, then got up and fired to first. O’Hearn is not speedy. He was thrown out. Ryan Mountcastle flew out afterwards and so another rally fizzled. That these two plays both went Kansas City’s way isn’t only a matter of luck, but it’s not NOT luck either.
Following on the heels of yesterday’s game, literally the last thing that Orioles fans, or the Orioles, needed was to let Kansas City jump out to an early lead. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Massey led off the game with a double that he ripped over the first base bag. On replays, it looked like Mountcastle at first base misread the bounce and stutter-stepped, costing him the chance to get a glove on the ball.
A Witt groundout to the right side of the field advanced Massey and he scored promptly as Vinnie Pasquantino – that is, the guy everyone wanted to walk Witt to pitch to yesterday – grounded one through the drawn-in infield. The Royals took a 1-0 lead.
You could be forgiven for thinking that might do it, that the team would lose back-to-back 1-0 games to be swept out of the postseason without ever scoring a run. Cedric Mullins chased that particular bad feeling away as he led off the fifth inning by ambushing a full count Seth Lugo mistake and driving it out into the right-center field seats. Mullins’s homer tied the game at 1-1.
From there, you already know the tragic outcome. The Orioles built up to the tragedy with some skill and some luck. Ramón Urías singled. Henderson drew a walk. Westburg hit a chopper that bounced to the third base side of the mound and Lugo wasn’t able to field it cleanly, resulting in a fielding error. The bases were loaded, no one was out. They had a golden chance to break the game open and exercise what is now a decade worth of postseason demons. They blew it. The O’s were 0-6 with RISP in the game.
It’s the offseason now. There will be plenty of time for recriminations, soul-searching, apportioning of the blame. There was a lot of disappointment packed into these two games, and into the three months that led up to these two games.
One way or another, the Orioles are going to need to do something different if they are ever going to get any farther than this. The 2024 Orioles, like the 2023 team before them, felt like they might have been going somewhere good, and when all was said and done, they finished without a single postseason win. That sucks.