Orioles close first half with 15-2 win over Twins, enter All-Star break riding 5-game winning streak – The Denver Post

On Tuesday evening, after a Fourth of July loss marked the Orioles’ sixth defeat in seven games, manager Brandon Hyde was asked whether the approaching All-Star break was coming at a good time for his scuffling team.

“We have five games to play to the All-Star break,” Hyde said in the tunnel of Yankee Stadium. “We’re going to need to play these five games well.”

Baltimore won all five, ending its first half with a 15-2 win over the Minnesota Twins to head into the break coming off its largest scoring output and a sweep of a team that began the series in first in the American League Central.

At 54-35, the 2023 Orioles posted the franchise’s best first half by winning percentage since 1997 and holds the majors’ third-best record. They’ll begin the second half Friday trailing the Tampa Bay Rays by two games for first place in the AL East.

“After that second game in New York, we were not playing baseball, and it was disappointing,” Hyde said. “I felt like the third game there really turned the corner for us, got some momentum, but we’ve been playing these last five games extremely well.”

Despite the stress his team’s tight games have often put on him, Hyde said before Sunday’s first-half finale that it was his players, not him, who need the All-Star break. But it actually seems that the midseason reprieve is coming just as the Orioles are taking off.

Over the five-game winning streak — which has come since the club promoted outfielder Colton Cowser, its No. 2 prospect — the Orioles have scored 44 runs, surpassing their total of 40 from the preceding 12 games. In each contest, Baltimore’s starting pitcher posted a quality start.

“This team, they don’t take at-bats off,” said Kyle Gibson, Sunday’s starter. “When we’re rolling like that, it’s a pretty hard lineup because you don’t end up ever coming across a guy who is taking an at-bat for granted, taking this situation for granted.”

Gibson’s outing began with a four-pitch walk and an RBI double by Edouard Julien, but by the time he allowed his next base runner on Julien’s sixth-inning homer, the Orioles had produced 14 runs.

Before their winning streak, the Orioles scored four or fewer runs in five straight games. They’ve since had six innings of at least four runs, including two Sunday. Entering the fifth inning of a 1-1 tie, Baltimore had struck out 10 times against Twins right-hander Joe Ryan, with All-Star starter Austin Hays’ second-inning solo shot producing their lone run. Ramón Urías broke the tie with a two-run home run, and Ryan recorded only one more out before the Orioles chased him with a pair of walks.

“I could be really sarcastic and say we were setting him up and getting his pitch count up, but that’s not really the case,” Hyde said with a laugh. “He was really good, and we had a tough time there with the elevated heater, a tough time with his slider. He was punching us out left and right, but we got a couple of big homers and just a great rally there in that inning, just an awesome offensive display. What a way to end the first half.”

With Minnesota bringing in a left-handed reliever, Hyde pinch-hit Ryan Mountcastle, making his first appearance since June 8 after experiencing vertigo. It was a quick first day back, with Mountcastle delivering an RBI single before Cowser pinch-ran for him. Hays then drove in a run with a single, and Aaron Hicks punctuated the inning with a three-run home run.

All-Star Adley Rutschman, who will participate in Monday’s Home Run Derby, got some practice in with a two-run shot in the sixth, with the projected distance of 461 feet marking the longest of his career.

“That was a bomb,” Hyde said. “He let it eat on that one.”

Anthony Santander followed with a solo blast, Baltimore’s first case of back-to-back home runs this season. Cedric Mullins, Urías and Gunnar Henderson also provided run-scoring hits in the six-run inning, and Santander answered Julien by opening the next frame with his second home run of the afternoon. The 15 runs marked the Orioles’ most this season, surpassing the 14 they scored Thursday against the New York Yankees.

In that game, 12 of the runs came between the third and fourth innings. Sunday marked the first time the Orioles scored 13 runs in a two-inning span since April 11, 2002, against Tampa Bay, when Baltimore scored once in the fifth before a 12-run sixth.

After scoring three runs in losing a series at home to Minnesota last weekend, the Orioles produced 24 runs for the road sweep.

“Great first half for everybody as a team,” Santander said. “I think this is good momentum to keep playing like this, the second half and playoffs. That’s what we want. That’s our mentality.”

But their recent success hasn’t all been on the offense. With seven innings in which he allowed two runs and struck out 11, Gibson provided the Orioles’ seventh straight start of at least six innings. It’s their first such streak since August 2016, Baltimore’s most recent playoff season.

The club enters the break positioned to end that drought. Baltimore’s 54 victories already match their highest total from any season from 2018 to 2021. In addition to the narrow deficit in the AL East, the Orioles end the first half with a five-game lead for the AL’s top wild-card spot.

“I think we kind of knew that we weren’t playing our best baseball there the first couple games in New York, for probably a 10-game stretch,” Gibson said. “We just needed a little bit of reset, we needed a couple breaks to go our way, and we needed to put a couple games together.

“To finish on a five-game winning streak, that changes everything going into break, really.”

MLB All-Star Game

At Seattle’s T-Mobile Park

Tuesday, 8 p.m.

TV: Chs. 45, 5

Marlins at Orioles

Friday, 7:05 p.m.

TV: MASN2

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

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