Good evening, all you night owls! If you manage to stay up ‘til midnight for this West Coast contest, your Orioles delivered a tight, tidy, well-pitched game and the team’s 74th win of the season. Gunnar Henderson broke open the game with a three-run double off San Diego’s Yu Darvish in the fifth, and that was all Baltimore pitching needed, especially with Grayson Rodriguez tossing the best start of his young career, seven innings with one run allowed and six strikeouts.
“A Tale of Two Seasons,” our Alex Church called this O’s-Padres matchup, describing the one team whose season graph is ticking upward, and the other whose graph is ticking down.