The Wednesday night Orioles game thread: vs. Mariners, 7:05

There's nothing particularly special about the second game back in Baltimore for Nelson Cruz with a different team. It's just another game. The fact is that most baseball games start out looking like just another game. A lot of baseball games end up looking like just another game, too. But you never know if some game will go unlike any other one you've ever seen before. On any given pitch you never know if you will see something unusual happen. That's what makes baseball fun.

Maybe the matchup of Wei-Yin Chen and Roenis Elias will generate a boring game that one team wins by like a 4-2 score and the losing team gets a few scoring chances but doesn't fail in an especially noteworthy way. Or maybe someone is about to hit three home runs and drive in nine, or someone is about to throw a no-hitter, or strike out 19.

Anyway, if you, like me, were scarred by the dark years, you probably have this impression that the Orioles were always terrible against left-handed pitchers and will always be terrible against left-handed pitchers - which Elias is. This year's Orioles actually have fewer at-bats against LHP than anyone else in the AL - and with a .737 OPS they're right about average. Whether that ends up meaning a dang thing tonight is not something we will ever know until it happens.