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.
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 a run off Yennier Cano in the ninth without a ball leaving the infield.
Blach’s performance and the late run 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. The only run he allowed came on Cedric Mullins’ solo home run in the fifth. He otherwise cruised in an 86-pitch afternoon.
He hadn’t topped 89 this year, so Colorado (49-81) turned to its bullpen in the eighth. With the left-hander gone, Baltimore manager Brandon 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. But an infield single and throwing error by shortstop Gunnar Henderson 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.
This story will be updated.
White Sox at Orioles
Monday, 7:05 p.m.
TV: MASN2
Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM
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