Yankees 5, Orioles 6: Baltimore gets walk-off win after a frustrating ninth inning

With the game tied going to the top of the ninth inning, things started off well for the Yankees when Didi Gregorius led off the inning with a single. After that, just about everything went wrong for them.

Gregorius was thrown out attempting to move up to second after a ball got away from catcher Caleb Joseph. On some angles, he appeared safe, but the call was upheld on review anyway. Then in the bottom of the inning, Dellin Betances hit Joseph with a pitch after missing out on a called third strike by not much.

Adam Jones then dropped a double down the line in right that stayed fair by inches. To cap things off, Jonathan Schoop got the game-winning hit, singling off a normally sure-handed Greg Bird’s glove.

When you make that many mistakes and get a bit unlucky that many times in a 10-ish minute period in a close game, it’s not going to go well. It didn’t, and that led to the Orioles squeaking out a 6-5 win in a frustrating game for the Yankees.

The Orioles nearly took a lead in the second inning, when Schoop appeared to have homered. However, it hit off the top of the wall and was instead changed to a double on review. A returning Masahiro Tanaka managed to work around that, but he couldn’t work around runners two innings later.

With two outs in the fourth, Chris Davis kept the inning alive with a single. Tanaka then walked Trey Mancini, and both came around to score when Joey Rickard doubled. It very nearly got worse after that when Baltimore loaded the bases, but Tanaka managed to hold them to just the two runs.

Andrew Cashner was perfect through the first 4.1 innings before Didi Gregorius single to give the Yankees their first base runner. They quickly got another when Miguel Andujar followed that with a walk in the next at bat. Bird then got the Yankees on the board, and gave them a lead, with a long home run.

The lead did not last long, as Manny Machado hit a home run on the very first pitch of the next half inning. After getting an out in the next at bat, Aaron Boone was out of the dugout and Tanaka was removed from the game after hitting his 80-pitch limit. The Yankees’ starter allowed three runs on six hits and two walks with five strikeouts. It wasn’t a great outing, but also not the absolute worst considering he just spent a month on the DL. Jonathan Holder came in for him and finished off the fifth.

The Yankees would go on to re-take the lead in the top of the seventh. Gregorius picked up a one-out double, and moved to third on a Andujar single. Bird scored Gregorius on a sacrifice fly, and a couple batters after that, Neil Walker singled home Andujar.

However once again, the lead would be erased thanks to Machado. In his second inning of work, Chad Green allowed a single to Adam Jones. Machado then hit his second home run of the game, immediately tying the game again. That’s maybe why the Yankees and others are looking at acquiring him.

The team traded zeroes until the Orioles picked up the winning run off Betances in the bottom of the ninth. From a Yankees’ perspective, this was an extremely annoying game.

Box score.