Those good vibrations from the first week of the season and from Opening Day have been killed, buried, dug up, desecrated, ground up, and finally made into horrible pies force fed to all of us.
Awful. Just awful.
Whoever it was that said "pitching is 90% of the game" never had to watch the Baltimore Orioles. Today's latest travesty featured the slumbering Orioles offense score two runs on: a Derrek Lee double play in the fourth and a Luke Scott sacrifice fly in the seventh. That was it. Tellingly, the Baltimore bats had just one walk (from Lee) and just one extra base hit (from Brian Roberts).
It was just another in a long line of poor offensive results on the young season, with the Orioles ranking very near the bottom of baseball in getting men on base and decidedly below average at hitting for power. No patience + no power = no runs. It's a simple formula, and the 2011 Baltimore Orioles are proving the heck out of it.
Brad Bergesen had the best outing of his season this afternoon, walking none and only allowing three runs in five innings before being lifted with 88 pitches to start the sixth. Bergesen never really felt like he was in control of the game, but the results don't lie, inducing 9 ground-outs to just 2 fly-outs. The bullpen more or less did their job, too; Jeremy Accardo allowed a home run to Travis Hafner but that was it for the Cleveland baseball club's late inning offense.
Interesting Factoid, courtesy of the Sun's Jeff Zrebiec: Koji Uehara allowed two walks today, breaking his streak of 37 appearances without allowing a walk. That had been the third longest such streak for any reliever in baseball since 1954. This was literally the most interesting thing about today, and it was Koji giving up walks.