‘This team just has so much fight’ – The Denver Post

When Dean Kremer jogged out to the Camden Yards mound Wednesday, he did so a day past the five-year anniversary of when the team he was about to face traded him to the Orioles. The 27-year-old right-hander is the only player left of the five Baltimore acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers when they traded star infielder Manny Machado five years ago Tuesday. For the Dodgers, the trade was one of many they have made as the cost of continually pushing for World Series titles.

It took half a decade, but the Orioles are now at the level to challenge for them, too, with their trade of Machado beginning a painful rebuild that’s finally paying off.

With Wednesday’s 8-5 victory to close their series with Los Angeles, the Orioles have gone 70 straight multi-game series without being swept, the eighth-longest streak in major league history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. With the Texas Rangers’ 5-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rays, completing a three-game sweep, Baltimore will enter its upcoming four-game series at Tropicana Field tied with the Rays (60-39) for the American League East lead, possessing the AL’s best winning percentage.

“This team just has so much fight in it,” left-handed reliever Danny Coulombe said. “Every game, it’s a battle for the other team.

“It’s going to be a fun series. This is what you want, and it’s what baseball wants. Just two really good teams. It’s going be some fun games.”

Part of a Baltimore bullpen that has struggled in the middle innings of late — including in dropping the first two games of this series — Coulombe bridged Wednesday’s game from Kremer to the Orioles’ All-Star relief duo of Yennier Cano and Félix Bautista. He retired seven of the eight batters he faced in a Dodgers lineup that entered Wednesday top three in the majors in runs per game, home runs, walks and OPS, and was coming off a 10-run output Tuesday.

“That was best-case scenario, and it happened,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “There’s just so many tough hitters in that lineup, and having the night we had last night, for Danny to do what he did, for me, that was his performance of the year. Won us the game, honestly.”

Hyde first managed the Orioles (58-37) in 2019, inheriting a team that had traded Machado and many other established players the previous summer and would deal more of them throughout his tenure. In each of his first three seasons, Baltimore held one of the majors’ five worst records. Last year, a budding core and the arrival of young stars began to shift the organization’s performance at the major league level.

In the middle of May 2022, a Detroit Tigers team that proved hapless swept the Orioles in a three-game series. A week later, Baltimore called up Adley Rutschman, the sport’s top prospect whose selection atop the 2019 draft belonged to the Orioles because of their 115 losses the year before. They haven’t been swept since he arrived.

“We’re not going to give any games away,” said rookie infielder Gunnar Henderson, who followed Rutschman in the 2019 draft and as baseball’s No. 1 prospect. “I feel like that’s what you have to do to make a postseason run.”

The Orioles entered this season with the playoffs as the stated goal for the first time in Hyde’s tenure, unexpectedly finishing as the AL’s best team to fall short in 2022. Many of the players who contributed to both years’ efforts are either products of the rebuild or players who weathered its 100-loss campaigns.

Kremer fits in both pools. Of the 15 players Baltimore acquired in trading Machado, Zack Britton, Jonathan Schoop, Kevin Gausman, Darren O’Day and Brad Brach in July 2018, Kremer is the only one who was on the Orioles’ active roster Wednesday and one of three still with the organization. He struggled mightily in Baltimore’s 2021 season that resulted in another No. 1 draft pick in 2022, but by the time the Orioles made that selection, he was establishing himself as a quality member of their rotation.

Making his first start against the organization that drafted him in 2016, Kremer had a long first inning in which he allowed two runs. But the Orioles answered with four runs in the bottom half of the inning, with Aaron Hicks and Jordan Westburg delivering RBI singles before Ramón Urías drove in two with a double. Kremer settled in, retiring nine straight batters for the Dodgers (55-40) as Baltimore plated two more runs in the third on another double by Urías and a wild pitch.

Urías, the AL’s Gold Glove third baseman last year, helped extend Kremer’s run of retirements with a strong backhand play and throw from foul territory to end the third. In the fourth, James Outman broke Kremer’s streak with a solo shot, becoming the first left-handed hitter to homer over Camden Yards’ deep left field wall in its two seasons.

The Orioles answered that run with Austin Hays’ sacrifice fly in the inning’s bottom half, and they responded to Max Muncy’s two-run shot off Kremer in the fifth with a home run by Henderson, the rookie’s first career home run off a left-handed pitcher as Baltimore plated eight against Los Angeles’ Julio Urías, who finished third in National League Cy Young Award voting last year.

“Not to be cocky, but I hope it won’t be the last one,” Henderson said with a laugh. “I know it was just a matter of time.”

As Machado was a decade ago, Henderson is a young infielder who arrived amid a long-awaited playoff chase, and he’s part of a large collection of young talent fueling Baltimore. But experience has helped, too. Entering for Kremer with two outs in the fifth, Coulombe, a veteran of nine seasons, allowed one hit over 2 1/3 innings, allowing Cano and Bautista to pitch an inning each and finish off the victory.

The game began after a 41-minute delay because of wet field conditions, meaning it ended not long before the Rays’ game that was initially scheduled to start an hour after it. The Orioles entered this month 6 1/2 games behind Tampa Bay. Now, they enter a matchup with them looking to stand alone atop the AL East in the second half of a season for the first time since August 2016. Hyde cautioned that his team has “still got a long way to go,” but playing meaningful baseball in July shows how far the organization has come since Kremer joined it five years ago.

“We’re out here still having fun,” Kremer said. “Ups and downs, but this is a very competitive ballclub all the way around, pitching, hitting, defense. We’ve been having a lot of fun.”

And they aren’t done yet.

Orioles at Rays

Thursday, 6:40 p.m.

TV: MLB Network (out of market only), MASN

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

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