Game Wrap and Morning Links: May 12, 2011

Baltimore 4, Seattle 2
Box Score / Play-By-Play / AP Recap

Last night had carried a sense of dread as the game began.  The Orioles were facing on the best starting pitchers in baseball in Felix Hernandez and the Mariners had been hot of late.  The realistic hope was that the Orioles would be able to last out Felix and get lucky of a errant pitch home run or two.  Instead, we were treated to a shaky outing by Felix where his pitches fell out of the zone a bit too much and his command was uncharacteristically off.  The Orioles waited him out and wound up getting good pitches to hit and those batted balls falling in.  On the Orioles' side, there was concern of former Mariner farmhand Chris Tillman throwing too many pitches and getting knocked out early.  Tuesday had been a rough night on the Orioles' pen and they needed to be saved as much as possible.  Tillman answered that with a good effort by going six inning while putting up a poor, but not horrific 112 pitches.  The other major note of the game was former Mariner Adam Jones being en fuego.  He saw only eight pitches last night, but he hit them for a hard triple and three solid singles.  He certainly has streaks like this when it seems like he can cover the whole plate on any kind of pitch.  If he can keep that up, we can think of him more as a superstar instead of being an average centerfielder, which also has a lot of worth.

Stat of the game

  6 innings

After a draining night on the pen yesterday, Chris Tillman was needed to go as deep as possible.  Tillman brought out 112 pitches over 6 innings.  This was not exceptional, but was needed.

Orioles Game ball

Adam Jones (4-4, 3B(1))

MiLB game balls

Norfolk (Box) - Blake Davis, PH (1-1, HR (2))
Bowie (Box) - Pedro Florimon Jr., SS (2-4, HR (3))
Frederick (Box) - Tyler Townsend, 1B (1-3, HR (7), BB)
Delmarva (Box) - Kipp Schutz (3-4).

Three Morning Links

Contracts have now been approved allowing for further renovation of the Orioles' Ed Smith Sports Complex.

Camden Crazies' Daniel Moroz reports from a conversation with an Orioles front office employee that the O's are not fully involved in international markets because the numbers do not work out.  The rest of baseball scratches its head.

Roch Kubatko reports that Brian Matusz threw 40 pitches in extended spring training as part of his rehab assignment..

Up Next

Zach Britton (3.97 xFIP, 136 ERA+) will try to lay in the sweep against the Seattle Mariners and Jason Vargas (3.96 xFIP, 80 ERA+).