Mike Clevinger’s Baltimore portent

Ken Blaze-USA TODAY SportsOn April 21st of last year, Mike Clevinger pitched the best game of his season, totaling an 84 Game Score while shutting out the Baltimore Orioles. In fact, by that metric it was the finest performance of his entire career to this point. The Orioles were dreadful in 2018 which helps take some of the shine off his brilliance. But this was when they still had Manny Machado, and a couple guys were at least having a decent start to the season before everything cratered. Clevinger’s line was 9 innings, 2 hits, 2 walks, 3 strikeouts, with the first hit coming in the 4th off Machado’s bat. It wasn’t a strikeout binge like he had against Cincinnati in July when he punched out 11 Reds in six innings, but the results spoke. Was he doing anything special at all?

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