This weekend, the Baltimore Orioles — the AL East’s version of the “before” guy in the old Charles Atlas ads — rolled into town. To a team starving for some wins, this is good news. So on Friday, I grabbed an extra case of Bud Light and canceled my weekend plans — very easy to do when you don’t actually have any — eager to soak in what would surely be three old-fashioned, one-sided beat downs. The kind of wins it seemed this team needed to right itself or boost the confidence or just have something to drink themselves silly over.
When the dust cleared, however, this weekend played more like the death knell for the whole concept of “run prevention.” The worst team in baseball — a team that showed up at our doorstep Friday night having won only two games — scored 16 runs against us over 3 games. That’s just one more run than the Os had scored over their last six games. And the two games that we did manage to win were taken by skinny one-run margins. Against the Yankees or Rays, this is to be expected. Against a team that’s won just a couple more games than the Delfonics — and, as a ’70s soul act, the Delfonics’ have approximately “zero” wins this season — it is unacceptable.
I know it’s still early in the season. Lots of ball to be played. A 10-game win streak in May will erase all these nasty memories. But watching these guys claw and scrap their way to a 2-out-of-3 showing against, if I may remind you again, the worst team in baseball left me disenchanted. Because that 10 game streak won’t mean much if afterward we’re still 6 games behind the Rays and Yankees.
Anyway. Speaking of the Delfonics…
