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A great demonstration of how dire things are for the Orioles right now can be seen in the number of people who have been clamoring for the O’s to bring up catcher Austin Wynns. The O’s have lost 13 straight, with a chance to drop a 14th straight today, and have a large number of problems in all facets of the game of baseball.
It’s brutal even considering that this is a rebuilding season where, as Mike Elias once famously said, winning is not strategically relevant. A bunch of guys who were being given the chance to either play their way onto the next good Orioles team or play their way into playing for a different good team in 2021 are having disastrous campaigns.
Enter Wynns. He arrives as Chance Sisco has been optioned to Norfolk, because Sisco is batting .154/.247/.185 in the 2021 season. It’s not great. Never mind that Wynns, 30, is also not great, with a .610 OPS in 70 games between the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
He hadn’t even kept his 40-man roster spot because the O’s decided they could move on; today, they had to place injured minor leaguer Richie Martin on the 60-day injured list to make a spot for Wynns. The team carried three catchers through the expanded roster in 2020 and one of those guys was not Wynns.
But he’s hit .333/.448/.563 in 15 games for the Tides and he’s not one of the two guys we’ve seen failing for the first two months of big league baseball, so maybe Wynns will improve something. He is in today’s starting lineup, so he’ll have a chance to affect things right away. I won’t hold my breath, though.
Orioles lineup
- Cedric Mullins - CF
- Trey Mancini - DH
- Anthony Santander - RF
- Maikel Franco - 3B
- DJ Stewart - LF
- Ryan Mountcastle - 1B
- Stevie Wilkerson - 2B
- Austin Wynns - C
- Pat Valaika - SS
Jorge López starts for the Orioles, with a chance to once again do battle with his dogged nemesis, the fifth inning, assuming he pitches well enough to even make it to the fifth inning.
Twins lineup
- Jorge Polanco - 2B
- Josh Donaldson - 3B
- Alex Kiriloff - RF
- Nelson Cruz - DH
- Mitch Garver - C
- Miguel Sanó - 1B
- Rob Refsnyder - CF
- Kyle Garlick - LF
- Andrelton Simmons - SS
And the Twins starting pitcher is José Berríos, whose most recent start came against the Orioles just six days ago. He gave up three runs, one earned, in 5.2 innings on that occasion.