Jackson Holliday hits grand slam, Westburg’s hand fractured as Orioles roll over Blue Jays, 10-4

The loss of Jordan Westburg is going to hurt

The bases were loaded with the Orioles holding a one-run lead in the game’s middle innings and Jackson Holliday stepped up to the plate. His first game back at the MLB level started out like his previous ones had done, with Holliday rolling over a couple of ground balls to the right side. In the fifth inning, a called strike and a foul ball had him facing an 0-2 count against Blue Jays reliever Yerry Rodríguez.

In came a slider right to the middle of the plate and Holliday did not miss. It was one of those beautiful swings where you know right off the bat that it’s gone, before the camera angle even changes from the view of the batter at home plate to the ball soaring out of there. Holliday obliterated that thing, a 109.3mph exit velocity that traveled 439 feet and landed… just let this MASN employee with an office view show you where it landed:

That’s a Eutaw Street shot, baby. In the history of the stadium, this marks the first time that a player’s first MLB home run has been a Eutaw Street grand slam. The crowd went bonkers as every Oriole rounded the bases, cheering on during the next at-bat until Holliday stepped to the top step of the dugout for a curtain call to acknowledge the fans. What a way to show those foolish few who’d had creeping doubts about his talent that he belongs.

Holliday’s grand slam put the Orioles up by an 8-3 margin, paving the way for what went on from there to be a comfortable 10-4 win over the Jays. Their awful month of July is over with a coulda-been-worse 12-13 record. The calendar is turning to August and perhaps the bad vibes of the offense will be gone as the new month arrives.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that right before Holliday stepped up to the plate for his grand slam, Rodríguez, who’d been wild and walked the two previous batters, had a pitch miss inside to Jordan Westburg that came in and hit Westburg on the hand. The Orioles third baseman came out of the game before the next inning of defense and after the game, manager Brandon Hyde announced that Westburg has a fracture, the kind where it’s now “hopes he can be back by the end of the regular season.”

Ouch. That bad news takes a lot of wind out of the sails of the good news, enough to make a person notice that there was some other bad news too, like Gunnar Henderson committing two more errors – two! – to continue his recent woes, and Grayson Rodriguez side-stepping what looked like a dominant outing (he struck out eight batters) by making enough mistakes that he gave up four runs (three earned) in six innings rather than spinning the unequivocally brilliant outing we’d all have liked.

The Orioles had the Jays number pretty much from the get-go. After two men got on base in the first inning, Ryan Mountcastle sliced a line drive towards right field and off the out-of-town scoreboard. Jays right fielder George Springer badly read the carom and the ball sailed past him, easily scoring the two runners and getting Mountcastle to third base with a triple. The O’s added to their lead as Colton Cowser hit a solo homer in the second inning, and again in the third when Henderson got a triple of his own and scored on a sacrifice fly.

Rodriguez made his first mistake as Jays outfielder Addison Barger led off the third inning. Barger ambushed a middle-in fastball and sent it to the flag court. Barger struck again in the fourth, driving in a run with an automatic double after Rodriguez had allowed some traffic. The Jays scored for a third straight inning when a pair of groundouts followed Springer leading off the fifth with a double and cutting the Orioles lead to 4-3.

That’s when Holliday blew things open with his grand slam, and it’s a good thing that he did, too, because the first of Henderson’s two errors led to the Jays scoring a fourth run in the very next half-inning. Rodriguez ended up allowing six hits and three walks over six innings, with the three earned runs allowed. This was good enough today.

Plenty of lovely totals remain in there to offer some encouragement that the team-wide July slump could be ending. Cowser, Henderson, Anthony Santander, and Cedric Mullins all had two hits. Mullins added three walks onto his 2-2 day. Holliday was inches away from getting a second home run, an opposite field shot that just barely missed catching the stripe on the left field fence and just barely missed bouncing into the fair pole.

I don’t think it missed the stripe, but the replay officials didn’t agree and we don’t need to get too mad when the Orioles scored double digits and won by six, especially when we’re already sad about Westburg.

Two days after getting hit by a pitch in the face that turned him into a bloody mess with a swollen left eye, James McCann caught this day game. He wore one of those serious business clear protective masks even when batting. McCann had a hit and a walk in five times up to the plate. That’s a tough dude.

This game also seems to have marked the start of another “let’s fix Craig Kimbrel in low-leverage situations” period. Kimbrel entered for the top of the eighth inning with the Orioles up by six runs. Kimbrel took 22 pitches to get through a scoreless frame against the bottom of the Jays lineup, issuing one walk but not allowing any hits or runs. Keegan Akin and Burch Smith, either of whom might be removed from the roster when new pitcher Trevor Rogers arrives, each added a scoreless frame on the way to the victory.

Elsewhere, the Yankees beat the Phillies. The Orioles hold an edge of just half a game in the AL East as we head into August. New York is off tomorrow, so the O’s will either get that back to one game ahead or fall into a tie that, for the time being, would be broken by the O’s superior record in the head-to-head matchup.

The Orioles go from playing a bad team that traded away players, the Jays, to a good team that added players, the Guardians. A four-game set awaits against the AL-best Guardians. As of this writing, no O’s starter has been announced. I’m expecting Rogers. Cleveland has Ben Lively lined up for the 6:40 Thursday series opener.