Zach Eflin stunk, the O’s offense went silent, and Tampa Bay outclassed the Birds in every facet to open a four-game set.
Tonight, against a tough divisional foe, the Orioles put their recent hot streak to the test. As for the result, well…is there a grade worse than F?
To call this game a mismatch would be an understatement. The Rays looked like men among boys, dominating every aspect of the game in the Orioles’ uncompetitive 7-1 defeat. Tampa Bay throttled a sweaty and ineffective Zach Eflin, peppering the ball all over the field and putting constant traffic on the bases, while the O’s offense failed to make a peep against brilliant Rays starter Ryan Pepiot.
These aren’t the Angels, folks. Faced with a much stronger opponent, the Orioles got knocked flat on their keisters.
It didn’t take long at all for the Rays to seize control of the game. Their very first batter of the game, Josh Lowe, swatted a high fly that looked like a pop-up off the bat but carried into the jet stream and sailed over the right-field wall. The Rays had a 1-0 lead and never looked back, continuing to bushwhack an erratic Eflin, who was almost immediately drenched with sweat on the humid 89-degree Tampa evening. Eflin, who spent his two-year Rays career pitching at the climate-controlled Tropicana Field, seemed none too comfortable with the outdoor environs of the Rays’ temporary home, Steinbrenner Field.
Eflin slogged through five innings and didn’t have a single scoreless one. The Rays, after their three-hit first inning, tacked on another trio of singles in the second inning, including Christopher Morel’s RBI bunt past a diving Eflin.
Truthfully the damage would have been much worse if not for a horribly blown call by first base umpire Bruce Dreckman, who called Lowe out at first on a play where he beat the throw by an easy step and a half. Rays manager Kevin Cash said something to Dreckman along the lines of, “That call was dreck, man.” But the Rays couldn’t ask for a review because they had lost their challenge on a pickoff play in the first inning.
It didn’t matter. The Rays had plenty more hits where those came from. The first two batters of the third inning reached base, and although Eflin induced a double play, he couldn’t totally escape the jam, giving up an RBI infield single to Jake Mangum. In the fourth, Eflin retired the first two batters before the Lowes, Josh and Brandon — whose last names are pronounced differently somehow — struck for a walk and a home run, respectively, to increase Tampa Bay’s run total to five.
Eflin didn’t throw a ton of pitches but the Rays constantly attacked him early in the count. Case in point: his first three pitches of the fifth inning resulted in a Jonathan Aranda single, a Junior Caminero double, and a Mangum two-run double. They were three different pitch types, too — cutter, sweeper, curve — but nothing in Eflin’s repertoire was working tonight. When he exited the game after the fifth, Eflin had coughed up a season-worst 12 hits along with seven runs. Woof. Please don’t tank that trade value, Zach.
What a contrast in offenses we saw tonight. While the Rays couldn’t stop getting runners on base, the Orioles could barely start. Against Tampa Bay starter Ryan Pepiot (pronounced PEPPY-o), the Orioles had anything but a peppy O.
The right-hander made the Birds’ bats look absolutely foolish, flummoxing them for eight outstanding innings in which he racked up 11 strikeouts. On the few occasions in which the O’s actually put a runner on base, a pair of ill-timed double plays thwarted any possible rallies. The Rays played excellent defense behind Pepiot, handling every tricky hop on the Steinbrenner Field dirt with aplomb. Pepiot was utterly unfazed by the humidity that had thrown Eflin so completely out of whack. And to think I wrote in the game thread that this was one of the best looking Orioles lineups of the year. A whole lot of good it did them.
The only run the Orioles managed came on another wind-aided homer, an Adley Rutschman lazy fly in the fourth that just kept carrying, landing in just about the same spot over the wall as Lowe’s. As MASN broadcaster Kevin Brown noted, Rutschman’s home run had a 49-degree launch angle, the highest of any MLB home run since May 12, 2024.
And that was it. Rutschman’s cheap dinger was the Orioles’ only highlight of the game, aside from a strong relief stint by newly recalled righty Colin Selby, who struck out five in two scoreless innings. This game was a stinker from the get-go, and may have further proved that the Orioles just aren’t equipped to pull off a miraculous comeback in the AL East standings.