They say it’s very hard to sweep a four-game series in baseball. But they must not have watched the 2026 Orioles.
In an inevitable result, the Yanks completed the sweep of the Orioles with a 12-1 win in the finale. Aaron Judge’s first-inning homer dug the O’s a hole from which they never escaped, with yet more defensive blundering and overwhelming offensive futility in RBI situations compounding the Orioles’ woes.
The Birds’ four-game jaunt to Yankee Stadium was, simply put, an embarrassment. The O’s were outscored by at least five runs in every game. They never held a lead at any point. Their defense was terrible, their pitching was worse, and their offense failed to show up time and time again. They were utterly outclassed at every turn, to the point that they looked like they weren’t even playing the same sport as the Yankees.
Other than that, though, everything is fine.
What’s there to say about a game that was essentially over in the first inning? Shane Baz was the latest O’s starting pitcher to simply not get the job done, and it started immediately when Trent Grisham led off the Yankees’ first with a double before Aaron Judge crushed a booming, two-run homer to right-center. Sigh. That happened, by the way, after Judge took a 2-2 pitch that was practically right down the middle, only to be called ball three, and Adley Rutschman failed to challenge it. I know you don’t generally want to risk losing a challenge in the first inning, but on a pitch that’s so obviously in the zone with Aaron Judge at the plate, I feel like it’s worth the gamble. Instead, it was 2-0 Yankees after just two batters.
There’s no shame in a pitcher being victimized by Aaron Judge, but it’s not as if Baz was good otherwise. He labored through his 5.2 innings and was tagged for six runs (five earned) while issuing a season-worst five walks. Seven starts into his O’s career, his ERA is just a hair shy of five (4.99). When exactly do we get to see the ace-caliber starter the Orioles thought they were trading for?
As usual, lousy defense cost the Orioles a run. On a Grisham double in the third, Leody Taveras lollipopped a bad throw from center field that Gunnar Henderson failed to corral, an equally sloppy play by both fielders. That allowed Grisham to advance to third, where he later scored on a sac fly. I dream that someday the O’s will play a clean defensive game. It probably won’t happen this season, but maybe someday.
You wouldn’t think a 3-0 deficit would be insurmountable, especially since the O’s collected their fair share of hits against Yankees pitching, but with the Orioles, no amount of failure is unachievable. The flamethrowing Cam Schlittler was pumping 100-mph fastballs into the zone with frequency but the O’s managed a baserunner against him in almost every inning. They just couldn’t capitalize once those runners were on base. The third and fifth innings were particularly painful, with the O’s putting the first two runners on base in both instance, only to ground into a rally-killing double play each time (Adley Rutschman first, then Blaze Alexander).
Even when the Orioles finally scratched across their first run, on a Colton Cowser bases-loaded walk in the sixth, they blew a chance at a big inning when Jeremiah Jackson struck out to strand three. At that point the O’s were 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position.
If there were any doubt, the Yankees put the game away in the sixth with three more runs, set up by two Baz walks followed by a run-scoring wild pitch, a Ryan McMahon RBI single, and a José Caballero double off Yennier Cano.
In the bottom of the eighth, the Orioles debuted newly signed reliever Lou Trivino, a 34-year-old with six years of MLB experience. Let’s just say that Lou fits right into this Orioles team. He was bludgeoned for six runs, four hits, and three walks in two-thirds of an inning, an outing so unspeakably atrocious that he had to be replaced by a position player, Weston Wilson. That Mike Elias sure can pick ’em! I can think of no more fitting way for this series to have ended.
The Yankees put the Orioles out of their misery with a quick top of the ninth. That ended the short-term humiliation of these four days at Yankee Stadium. But the long-term humiliation of these 2026 Orioles, sadly, has only just begun.
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