Rangers Sweep Orioles with 7-1 Game 3 Romp

The biggest at-bat of Tuesday’s Orioles-Rangers game didn’t happen. Corey Seager stepped to the plate in the bottom of the second inning with Texas ahead 1-0 and Dean Kremer already laboring. Seager was the last person the O’s wanted to see at the plate. That run already on the board? It came courtesy of a Seager solo shot in the first inning, and there were runners on second and third with two outs. Brandon Hyde decided discretion was the better part of valor and extended four fingers for an intentional walk – a plate appearance instead of an at-bat, you see. That’s the last time the Orioles were really in the game.

Mitch Garver, whose spot in the lineup Bruce Bochy jokingly attributed to a personal rule – “if you hit a grand slam, you’re in there the next day” – was due up next. He pulled a changeup down the left field line – I’m not a pitching coach, but uh, don’t throw a right-right changeup when it’s the fourth pitch in your arsenal – and drove two runs home. Adolis García came up next and got behind 1-2, but then he got a fastball he could handle and didn’t miss. He demolished it to left, the ball disappearing impossibly fast. It was 6-0 Rangers. Thanks for playing, Baltimore, and better luck next year.

Okay, fine, the game didn’t actually end there. There were still seven innings of play left, still 21 outs worth of life in the Orioles’ season. Both teams get to bat, and things that happen on one side of the ball don’t necessarily affect the other half of the inning. The Rangers allowed eight runs Sunday night, a disastrous tally – and won comfortably. There’s no rule that says Baltimore couldn’t allow six runs in the first two innings, then turn around and score some comically larger number to win anyway.

One problem with that: Nathan Eovaldi. His most notable postseason appearance might still be a losing effort in the 2018 World Series, but he’s done nothing but succeed in the playoffs. He came into the night with a 2.90 ERA across 49.2 innings of work, and picked up right where he left off. After two wide fastballs to begin his outing, he started attacking and never stopped.

He got ahead 0-2 against 10 of the next 12 hitters he faced. Those other two? They put first-pitch strikes into play. The Orioles were a patient group this year, averaging 3.9 pitches per plate appearance. They took 70% of first pitches, a top-10 mark in baseball. That didn’t work out particularly well in Game 3, to say the least. Eovaldi got ahead and stayed ahead on his way to a crushingly efficient night: seven innings pitched, seven strikeouts, no walks, and a single earned run.

Maybe, then, that second-inning pivot point didn’t really matter. Baltimore’s offense simply didn’t have it. Gunnar Henderson put together a 3-for-4 night with three singles, but no one else could get things going. Henderson contributed the Orioles’ lone RBI of the evening, and the closest thing to a rally was an eighth inning Aroldis Chapman mop-up appearance gone wrong. His command looked about as good as mine would out there; he threw 20 pitches and only found the strike zone seven times.

That excitement didn’t last long. José Leclerc came in and restored order with a bunch of fastballs and sliders and cutters, just like he always seems to. Things moved quickly from there; three up and three down in the ninth, and in a brisk two hours and 48 minutes, Baltimore’s season was over. The Orioles were down and out so fast that the drama of an elimination game never even really materialized.

Still, I can’t help but think back to Seager in the second – Schrödinger’s at-bat, if you will. We’ll never know what would have happened if the Orioles hadn’t walked him. That hypothetical matchup, whether against Kremer or a reliever, exists in a superposition – it’s both an out and a single, a waveform that never collapsed into a single outcome. What actually happened is that the Rangers scored five runs and made the outcome academic. Maybe Seager would have clobbered a homer. Maybe he would’ve struck out. Maybe he would’ve walked! But we’ll never know, and the way things actually went didn’t go well for the Orioles.

It’s futile to think about baseball this way, I know. The game is full of these what if’s, and none of them affect the final score. This series came down to a few big innings; the Rangers outscored the Orioles by 10 runs, and they had two five-run innings (plus a four-run inning that doesn’t suit this take quite so well). You can do the math. All the innings count; it simply doesn’t matter that the teams played to a standstill from the third inning onward.

That’s the cruel part of October. Over 162 games, the Orioles ground and scraped their way to 101 wins. They outperformed their underlying statistics, sure, but they earned that outperformance every night. With runners on base, with the game on the line, they delivered time after time, right up until the calendar flipped and none of that mattered. 162 games of looking the part, three of getting kicked in the teeth; sometimes that’s how it goes.

Treating this as some shortcoming on the part of the Orioles isn’t right either, though. The Rangers earned this one. They pummeled a pitching staff that seemed to be hitting its stride at just the right time. Orioles starters lasted eight innings across three games and allowed 13 runs; the Texas lineup simply could not be contained. They looked like a dominant team, notwithstanding a pitching hiccup earlier in the series.

The Rangers invested in this roster in every imaginable way, from building a farm system to signing marquee free agents to adding key contributors in trade. When Jacob deGrom got hurt, they reloaded with Max Scherzer – and with Jordan Montgomery, too, just in case Scherzer didn’t pan out. They took as few chances as possible. The playoffs might come down to a few innings here and there, but the Rangers gave themselves the best possible odds of winning those innings. What more can you really do?

In a different world, I might be writing the same thing about the Orioles. They’ve had three-game stretches that looked as good as Texas’ last week has. Heck, they’ve had months that looked like that. Brighter days surely lay ahead. But right now, the Rangers are in command, advancing to their first ALCS since 2011. If they keep playing at this level, this could be a delightful postseason for them.