The Baltimore Orioles’ improbable ride to the top of the American League East continued on Thursday as Taiwanese starter Chen Wei-yin delivered 7-1/3 solid innings, before the bullpen threw 6-2/3 scoreless innings in an electrifying 3-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays.
Manny Machado delivered the game winner, lining a two-out, run-scoring single off Chris Archer in the bottom of the 14th inning to the delight of the 25,130 fans at Camden Yards.
Machado’s hit was nearly caught by Matt Joyce, but the ball fell just under the left-fielder’s glove, allowing Adam Jones to trot home from second and give the Orioles their 13th successive extra-innings win.
Photo: AFP
“I thought it had a chance to get down,” Orioles manager Buck Showalter said of Machado’s hit. “With their outfield, they’re so good defensively, you expect them to catch everything. It was fortunate it found some grass.”
Joyce said he was so close to making the catch he was not sure exactly where the ball landed.
“Honestly, I don’t know if it was underneath my glove,” he said. “I know it hit my glove on the bottom. It was hard to tell what exactly happened. Only thing I can tell you is I didn’t come up with it.”
The win guaranteed the Orioles (81-62) a .500 record for the first time since 1997 and put them into a tie with the New York at the top of the table after the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 2-0 at Fenway Park.
Although the victory snapped the Orioles’ losing streak at 14 seasons, Showalter said that was never an incentive for his club, noting the players have “a bigger goal in mind.”
“That wasn’t the goal from day one of the spring, or even day one of the off-season,” he said. “It’s watching other teams for years and saying: ‘We want to do what they’re doing.’ We’d like to get a chair at the dance, you know?”
The 20-year-old Machado said he is “having a blast this season.”
“This team is great to be around,” Machado said. “It’s a great group of guys. We’re all excited. We all have one goal, which is make the playoffs.”
The Rays (77-66), who were a season-high 10-1/2 games off the pace in the East on July 18, dropped all three games of the series with Baltimore and fell four games out of first.
Tampa Bay, who have lost an American League-worst 26 one-run games, took a 1-0 lead in the fourth when Ben Zobrist tagged from third on a sacrifice fly by Jeff Keppinger.
Jones made a diving catch, but his throw home was a shade late to catch Zobrist.
Baltimore’s Taylor Teagarden, a seldom-used catcher hitting just .119 entering the game, delivered a seventh-inning, two-run double to the gap in right-center to put the Orioles on top 2-1.
However, Tampa Bay tied the game at 2-2 the next inning when an infield single by Zobrist scored Desmond Jennings from third.
Showalter, whose team were set to travel to Oakland for a three-game series with the Athletics, did not seem impressed by the Orioles’ prowess in extra-inning games.
“I was thinking in the dugout: ‘If we’re so good at it, why didn’t we do [win] it in the 10th inning?’” he said with a smile.
Additional reporting by Staff writer
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later
RSS