Upside-Down Game
The Orioles started well against the Oakland A’s tonight with a Reimold double – scoring on back to back sac flies. But not enough else went well enough, and the O’s drop the opener of the 3-game series.
Arrieta gave up 4 runs in 5.2 innings and just never got into a groove. His pitch count elevated quickly, helped by a lot of foul balls by A’s hitters – who had a Yankees-ish approach to the plate tonight. Arrieta’s fastball was moving well – often tailing out of the zone completely. And he hung a couple of homerun pitches that were not missed. Jake has been snake-bit lately by some long innings, and he needs to figure out how to make effective pitches deep into a long inning.
Oakland simply played a fine game. They had very strong pitching – their forte – along with solid defense and timely hitting with the few opportunities presented.
More proof that this game was entirely upside-down was that Kevin Gregg came in and retired the side 1-2-3. It just looked so weird!
The previous two evenings I’ve written recaps on the final Blue Jays games. I made a competition out of it to see if I could post the summary article before the pros did – like on the Orioles page or on MASN.com with Roch Kubatkis … and I beat them both nights! But, I’m guessing they go to a post-game interview. But I did have mine up on BirdsWatcher.com in about 5-7 minutes after the game ended – with pics!! But it is not my primary role there to write recaps, and I got kinda called down on it … more reason why I’m back to writing here.
Anyhow, the Birds are now 12-8 in the first 20 games. Anyone would have taken this before the season started. In fact, we’d all take it as a pace for the whole season! It would equate to a final record of 97-65 – almost certainly good enough for the playoffs.
On that theme, if you go over to the Fansided Network blog I write, you might want to check out the piece I did after 16 games about how people always say that the Orioles begin fast every season, but then die. Is that true? Well, as you can read, there is quite a bit of truth to that, though not every year.
Here is a link: http://birdswatcher.com/2012/04/23/the-orioles-always-start-hot/
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