allquixotic

Well. Color me shocked and amazed.

The Guardians are not good. But Kremer has nothing tonight, and I would be shocked and amazed if our offense can score 3 runs today.

We should bring up some AAA position players to pitch, and just take every pitch looking (basically forfeit, except I don't think MLB will technically allow you to actually forfeit) and rest up for the wildcard series. No way in heck they're winning the division playing like the 2018 Orioles. Every decent starter and pen arm and every decent position player should not be in a game until the wildcard. Let them go home, rest, take a breather, forget about baseball for 5 days, then sharpen up their skills as we get closer to the wc series. Yes, I'm saying they should deliberately tank. Better than trying as hard as they can and still going to the WC. Catcher Ryan McKenna, you're up.

Cya guys tomorrow. I have no words.

Darren O'Day. Oh, wait.

Watching our bullpen in September has been like Chinese water torture.

Let's see if we can find another Cleveland pitcher who isn't Cy Young tonight and take the lead. Oh yeah, and we BETTER not cough up another gd run in the bot 8. I swear to christ, if someone coughs it up...

Thank GOD for O'Hearn!!!!! Orioles Magic, baby!!! YEAH!!!!

WELL... We scored a run. On a groundout. Like a half-swig of water in a desert.

RIGHT AT EM... UGH. This offense makes me SICK!!!!

Santander! Swing the g-d d-mn bat! Sheesh!!! Staring at strikes, dude! Chris Davis syndrome???

An XBH! And with less than two outs, to boot! A miracle! Now... CAN they capitalize.

Gunnar... man. Flat, flat, flat. Hitting the ball like Vlad Guerrero Jr.

The big question is how long this team-wide offensive outage will persist. In the dark years, when these power outages occurred, they'd persist for 1-2 months at a time. Even in 2012, 2014 and 2016, we ended the season with flat offense and it persisted for like the last 10 games plus the postseason. This year, when they've had power outages before, it's been short-lived. A few games at most. But if this persists much longer, we're going to be a wildcard.

Nothing grinds my gears more than when our offense just rolls over. The past two games have been hard to watch.

No, this is on the offense. You can't win if you can't score. 1 run is not enough for an MLB club.

Bradish fought hard for this game, but ultimately, this is on the offense. Eight innings of one run ball from Bradish and the 'pen. If you lose a game like that, you can't blame the last reliever in the 9th for losing 2-1. Saw some of the worst plate discipline the O's have had this year in today's game. Oh well, series win.

Bradish is awesome.

I got section 268 row 3 for ALDS game 2 Section 65 row 5 for ALCS game 2 Section 262 row 3 for ALCS game 3 Did not get wildcard game because we're winning the Division. Mwahahahahahaahha. None of my seats contain an aisle. I have 2 Non-Aisle tix for each of the above games/sections. If anyone wants to swap similar-ish tickets (or even "worse" tickets, i.e. further away from the field) and has an aisle seat they don't need, send me a PM please. We will be really squished in there given our size, especially in section 65 for the ALCS. I'd very much like to barter non-aisle tix for someone else's aisle tix. I'll even take upper deck. NOTE: I am not currently aware of whether the O's will allow people to swap tickets before entry on Birdland Membership tickets. I think they might verify identity; not sure. If they do, we can still get in the gate with our original tickets, then just swap tickets in the park and sit in each other's seats.

With online bots (that are very, VERY good at not being detected), it is possible to automate clicks in your web browser in a way that is basically undetectable to the website, and go through the website and buy tickets way faster than a human can. As a result of this, all tickets will INSTANTLY sell out (and by "instantly", I mean within 30-60 seconds of them becoming available to the general public). After that, 70% of the tickets will be put right back on the market, either private sale, on StubHub, on SeatGeek, or other sites -- for a massive, enormous, hideous markup. This is called scalping, and it used to be bad in the old days, but it's completely unreasonable and beyond the pale now. Expect to pay between 3x to 50x the cost of the ticket if you'd bought it directly from the Orioles if you are getting a scalped ticket. Pretty much the only way to get a reasonably priced ticket to a playoff game (and by "reasonable" I mean only a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand) is by getting a Birdland Membership, or using a web automation bot yourself.

What a game!

Jorge Lopez is useless.

OMG, an Orioles team doing a squeeze play, one game after they did a double switch... this is just unreal... they are pulling out every stop to try to win. Bless them.

WOW. Doing a Double Switch there was pretty smart. I didn't really understand how that works mechanically, so I had to read up on it. Apparently it's sort of a vestigial rule that is very seldom used anymore, since both leagues play with the DH Rule now. I guess the one situation where it comes into play is when you have to forfeit the DH. We did because we brought Kjerstad in as a position player after Hicks got hurt. None of those decisions ended up factoring into the game really because we didn't need a 10th inning, and there wasn't much for the defense to do when Cano gets the K, but it was good practice as a demonstration of how you can use the rules to eke out every advantage just in case they tied it up. After a single and an out, that double switch would have mattered a lot in an 8-8 game. Just smart baseball. He has a lot of experience being a coach in the NL, so I guess the Double Switch immediately comes to mind as a familiar managerial move.

That was an incredible finish.