Welcome back, Derrek Lee. We missed your silky smooth glove at first base and look forward to you saving errors and spryly diving for ground balls and line drives that lesser mortals simply could not touch. Hopefully your wrists are finally getting better and you can hit some home runs, or at least maybe some doubles. That would really be awesome.
So long for now, Pedro Viola. You'll be back, probably. I was rooting for Michael Gonzalez to be DFA'd instead, but it just wasn't meant to be.
Let's turn our attention to tonight's game, much as we may not want to, considering that the Orioles have lost six of their last seven games and are facing the best starter that the Blue Jays have to offer: Ricky Romero, who's sitting pretty with a 2.88 ERA after 72 innings pitched. Unsurprisingly, Romero has a strong record against the Orioles in his career, with a 1.88 ERA in four starts against the O's last year, and he'll be facing an offense even more putrid than the one fielded last year.
Jake Arrieta will be looking to turn it around for the Orioles tonight, coming off a disastrous start in Seattle where he only made it 2.1 innings. He won't be having any easy pickings in this game either with the hot Jays hitters he will be facing. We saw some of that last night, and that didn't even feature a Jose Bautista home run, although he did get on base three times, boosting his OBP to .504. Adam Lind returns from the DL for Toronto and he will be DHing tonight.
The Orioles really need a breakout game in a big way, and it needs to come from someone other than Adam Jones and JJ Hardy, who are already the team's two best hitters. We need some of the big, strong guys Buck Showalter talks about in his TV commercial about "hairy" players to really come through. Maybe it would help if they all grew a bunch of hair? I hear it works for Youkilis.
| Blue Jays (R. Romero - L) @ Orioles (J. Arrieta - R) | |||