Grayson suffered his worst start in nearly 11 months, putting the Birds in an early deficit from which they couldn’t recover.
This one, folks, was not worth staying up for.
The Orioles, despite unveiling one of the most glorious lineups of homegrown talent you’ll ever see, took a disappointing loss to the Angels, 7-4. A Grayson Rodriguez implosion and a late-arriving O’s offense put the Orioles behind the eight ball from the outset, and they never recovered.
Imagine you ran a thousand simulations of this game. How many would result in the previously unbeaten Grayson Rodriguez getting torched for seven runs by a below-average Angels offense while the previously winless Griffin Canning — he of the 8.05 ERA and the 1.096 OPS by lefty hitters against him — held a prolific O’s lineup of eight lefties in check? Baseball is weird, man. Weird, and so, so cruel.
Let’s just rip off the Band-Aid right away when discussing Grayson’s outing tonight. He stunk. He flat-out stunk, folks, and he’d be the first to admit it. His fastball had no movement. His breaking balls didn’t break. Every pitch seemed to linger tantalizingly in the middle of the strike zone, and major league hitters, even struggling ones, are going to crush those pitches early and often.
And certainly one of the best hitters in recent MLB history is going to do so, and that’s precisely what Mike Trout did, leading off the game with a no-doubt homer to center. That, by the way, was Trout’s first leadoff homer since 2012, when Grayson was 12 years old. Ron Washington’s gambit of moving Trout to the leadoff spot for the first time in years seemed to spark the Angels offense.
Rodriguez got through the rest of the first inning without allowing a run, giving little indication of the disaster that was to come. But it revealed itself soon enough. In the second, the Angels ambushed him for three consecutive hits by the 7-8-9 hitters — Jo Adell, Luis Rengifo, and Zach Neto — to plate a couple of runs. Rodriguez didn’t get much help from newly recalled Heston Kjerstad, making his second career start in right field. Kjerstad first fumbled Rengifo’s hit to right field, turning it from a single into a double. On the next play, Kjerstad overthrew the cutoff man after fielding Neto’s grounder, allowing him to take second. OK, so Heston is still a work in progress defensively.
The hits kept coming against Rodriguez in the third. Two more doubles, by Taylor Ward and Logan O’Hoppe, made it a 4-0 game, and Adell’s RBI single added run number five. At that point, Rodriguez had already coughed up his most runs in a regular season game since last May 26, his last outing before he was sent down to the minors for a reset. (He also gave up five in his Division Series appearance, but let’s not get into that.)
But it only got worse. The Angels’ fourth inning featured two more runs and three more hits, including Neto’s scorched RBI double down the left-field line and Nolan Schanuel’s sharp single that brought Neto home. None of these hits were cheapies, people. The Angels were all over Rodriguez.
Not wanting to completely burn out the bullpen, Brandon Hyde let Rodriguez pitch into the fifth inning, but put him out of his misery after a one-out single. His final line was one to forget: 4.1 IP, seven runs, and a career-worst 11 hits. Yikes. Let’s flush this one and move on.
Rodriguez may have put the Orioles in a huge hole, but the O’s offense did surprisingly little to climb out of it against Canning, one of the league’s worst pitchers in 2024. As mentioned, the Angels hurler turns every left-handed batter he faces into a Hall of Famer, so Hyde stacked his lineup as such, with Jordan Westburg the only true right-handed bat among the nine. And yet, for four innings, the O’s simply couldn’t touch Canning. He retired nine of the first 10 batters he faced, striking out three, and even carried a modest no-hitter into the fourth. Like I said, baseball is weird.
The O’s squandered a golden opportunity in the fourth, getting the first two runners on base before wasting it with a flyout, a strikeout, and a grounder. Finally, in the fifth — a few innings too late, if you ask me — they broke through. Westburg led off with a single, and with one out, Jackson Holliday delivered a welcome sight: a hit! Holliday jumped on a first-pitch curveball and lashed it into center field for just his second major league hit in 34 at-bats. Gunnar Henderson plated the first run with a sac fly, and after an Adley Rutschman single, Ryan O’Hearn laced a double to the left-center gap to bring home two more. The O’s had cut the lead to 7-3.
Sensing that Canning’s magic was running out, Washington pulled him after five. The Orioles continued to make things interesting in the seventh when Henderson absolutely demolished a home run to right off lefty Matt Moore, his team-leading seventh of the year. The O’s put two more runners on base and, impressively, they now had the potential tying run at the plate in a game they once trailed by seven. But right-hander Luis García retired Anthony Santander and Cedric Mullins to leave them stranded, keeping it a 7-4 game.
The Orioles didn’t get any closer. García mowed through a perfect eighth inning, and closer Carlos Estévez, pitching for the first time in a week, retired the O’s 1-2-3 in the ninth. It was a particularly rough day for the Orioles’ outfield of Kjerstad, Mullins, and Colton Cowser, plus erstwhile outfielder Santander, who was DHing. That quartet was a combined 0-for-15 with eight strikeouts, three apiece by Kjerstad and Mullins.
You can’t win ‘em all. But, Orioles, did you have to make us stay up until 12:30 just to watch you lose?