Orioles spring training game thread: vs. Red Sox, 6:05

After a nearly six month absence, the Orioles are finally coming back to our televisions tonight! Thursday’s spring training contest between the O’s and the Red Sox is one of the three exhibitions that MASN will televise before teams break camp and get the regular season started. It is a small but exciting marker of progress on the way to real baseball being back in our lives.

That bit of excitement aside, this game will also mark the first brush with frustration of MASN being one of the only television networks not to send its baseball broadcasters on the road to start the season. Though this is a home game for the Orioles in the context of the Grapefruit League, it’s enough of a road game for the Maryland-based MASN that the broadcasters will be calling the game from Camden Yards.

The game will also be called on Orioles radio, whose broadcasters WILL be in Sarasota for the game. As a reminder, if you’re in central Maryland, the Orioles radio home is now on 98 Rock (97.9 FM) and WBAL Radio (1090 AM/101.5 FM). If you’re elsewhere in the Orioles Radio Network, good luck on your local affiliate choosing to air a spring training game.

The condensed schedule for spring training this year has made everything weird. There hasn’t even been a week since games started, which means teams are mostly going to be easing the regulars into action, but also Opening Day is two weeks from tomorrow, which means it’s really time to start ramping guys up.

The lineup that the Orioles have put out looks mighty Opening Day-ish:

1. Cedric Mullins - CF
2. Ryan Mountcastle - 1B
3. Trey Mancini - DH
4. Anthony Santander - RF
5. Austin Hays - LF
6. Ramón Urias - 2B
7. Jorge Mateo - SS
8. Kelvin Gutiérrez - 3B
9. Beau Taylor - C

Bruce Zimmermann is the starting pitcher, expected to be followed by Zac Lowther, Cole Sulser, Travis Lakins, Bryan Baker, and Conner Greene.

You can make an easy case that other than the catcher’s spot - which will probably be Robinson Chirinos - this is the exact order of names and positions that we’ll see in another 15 days. The only real question to me is whether Rougned Odor finds his way in there or not.

The Red Sox, as the road team, are NOT sending out an Opening Day-looking lineup:

1. Kiké Hernández - CF
2. Jarren Duran - LF
3. Kevin Plawecki - C
4. Travis Shaw - DH
5. Rob Refsnyder - RF
6. Roberto Ramos - 1B
7. Jonathan Araúz - SS
8. Ryan Fitzgerald - 2B
9. Alex Binelas - 3B

Nick Pivetta is the Red Sox starting pitcher.

As an aside, this is something of a historic (in a completely irrelevant way) game thread for Camden Chat, as it’s going to be the first one to happen under the new comment system. If you’d like to be a part of this non-history, then I’ll see you down there, where it doesn’t know my name is Mark Brown and I’ve gone back to being Eat More Esskay instead.