Orioles shut down by Ty Blach, one of the worst pitchers of their rebuild, in 4-3 loss to Rockies – The Denver Post

Part of the reason the story of the 2023 Orioles is so great is the teams they have followed, the years of ineptitude and bad baseball, batters who struggled to get hits and pitchers for whom it sometimes seemed impossible to get outs.

Ty Blach was among the latter. Five mostly disastrous starts in 2019 left him as, by one statistical measure, the worst pitcher in franchise history. Sunday at Camden Yards, he delivered one of the best opposing pitching performances this year’s Orioles have seen, allowing a run over seven innings in the Colorado Rockies’ 4-3 victory to avoid a sweep.

“Give Ty credit,” said Orioles manager Brandon Hyde, who was in his first year with Baltimore in 2019. “We weren’t making adjustments to him.

“He gave us fits.”

With Blach out of the game, the Orioles tied the score on Ryan O’Hearn’s pinch-hit, two-run home run in the eighth, but Colorado managed an unearned run off All-Star Yennier Cano in the ninth without a ball leaving the infield.

Blach’s performance and the late run cut Baltimore’s lead in the American League East to two games and pushed the possibility of the Orioles (81-49) guaranteeing a winning season back at least a day. They were far from that status when the 32-year-old left-hander pitched for Baltimore four years ago. One of the innumerable castoffs who pervaded their pitching staffs around the turn of the decade, Blach arrived as a waiver claim from the San Francisco Giants in August 2019 and made five starts for the Orioles. In them, he posted an 11.32 ERA, the worst of any pitcher to open at least that many games for Baltimore. Yet his performance felt commonplace on a roster of players who did not belong.

Despite his struggles, Blach remained with the Orioles into 2020, suffering an elbow injury in the summer camp ramp-up out of the coronavirus shutdown that necessitated Tommy John elbow reconstruction and getting released soon after. But Baltimore re-signed him the next spring, allowing him to rehabilitate in their minor league system. The Denver native has spent the past two years with his hometown team, but he hadn’t put together a performance like Sunday’s, which marked his first time going seven innings since 2018.

He retired the first nine batters he faced before the Orioles loaded the bases with no outs in the fourth, but Austin Hays grounded into a double play where both lead runners were out before Gunnar Henderson flied out. Cedric Mullins hit a solo home run in the fifth, but Blach otherwise cruised in an 86-pitch afternoon.

“He stayed out of the middle of the plate today,” Hays said. “Just lived on the edges. Used three different pitches to different parts of the zone. Got some calls. He just didn’t make a whole lot of mistakes today.

“Just couldn’t really get any momentum going.”

Blach hadn’t topped 89 pitches this year, so Colorado (49-81) went to its bullpen in the eighth. With the left-hander gone, Hyde turned to one of the left-handed hitters on his bench, with O’Hearn swatting the first pitch he saw from Jake Bird to even the game. Colorado entered Sunday having lost six straight games despite leading in the sixth inning or later in each, while the Orioles’ 40 comeback victories are the most in the AL.

“We’re like, ‘All right, here we go again,’” Hays said. “Seems like we always find a way. Somebody comes off the bench and does it.”

But Baltimore couldn’t break in front, and an infield single off Cano and a throwing error by Henderson at shortstop preceded two more grounders, putting the Rockies back ahead.

Their initial lead came in the fourth, as Orioles starter Jack Flaherty surrendered the first of the three runs he gave up over his 5 2/3 innings in his first start in 12 days after struggling to “bounce back” from his previous outing. He said he felt much better physically Sunday, with his pre-start throwing session Saturday going much differently than the one Tuesday that prompted Baltimore to scratch him from Wednesday’s start.

“The extra days [were] good just to get some things ironed out,” Flaherty said.

Through four starts, the Orioles’ signature trade deadline addition, acquired from the St. Louis Cardinals for three top 20 prospects, has a 6.41 ERA, though that would be 3.78 without the seven-run, three-inning outing against the San Diego Padres that preceded his extended break. Sunday’s outing came an out shy of giving the Orioles a seventh straight start of at least six innings.

“Extremely competitive, wants to be out there,” Hyde said. “Getting that start pushed back, he was upset about that because he wants to help out this team, and gave us every chance today. We just didn’t score enough.”

Around the horn

• Hyde said the Orioles had no updates Sunday morning on All-Star closer Félix Bautista, who was placed on the 15-day injured list Saturday with an injury to the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.
• With Flaherty rejoining the six-man rotation, Baltimore will stay on turn for its upcoming series with the Chicago White Sox, starting right-handers Grayson Rodriguez, Dean Kremer and Kyle Gibson.

White Sox at Orioles

Monday, 7:05 p.m.

TV: MASN2

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

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