Tonight didn’t go well.

It started out well enough, with Jason Hammel dealing and the Orioles going up 2-0 in the first. Unfortunately, the pitching and defense faltered at bad times throughout the night, with Chris Davis missing at least two plays at first base that could have made things better. As a result, Chris Davis became this game’s scapegoat.

Chris Davis is tonight’s Morris Marina, everybody!

Now that we’ve named today’s Morris Marina of the game, let’s move on and look at this a little more closely. There were a few instances, for example, where the Orioles had men on base and were unable to score. At one point, they had two men on and were still able to get neither of them across. The biggest blow they managed on the night was a three-run homer from J.J. Hardy, which actually put the Orioles up 5-2 at one point. For a while, they looked like they had a chance.

Success is truly elusive in this town, it seems.

That being said, once again the team did fight until the end, and although they were defensively incompetent and couldn’t pitch at times, they didn’t quite give up, which I certainly approve of. The problem is that they didn’t take the opportunities that they needed to take. Ivan Nova was spotty when he started this game for the Yankees, but too many batters swung and missed instead of letting Nova walk them. Had we been patient, we might have had a better chance here.

Well, that and I think we need a competent first baseman. Anyone have one they can share with us? We promise we won’t total him* or anything…

*Not actually guaranteed. These are the Orioles.

Well, they had to lose sometime. Since I’m a little sad about that, here is a picture of Louise and Barnaby wearing rabbit ears.

Brian Matusz got his first start of the year tonight, and he struggled out of the gate – 30 pitches in the first inning alone. There was an error behind him, as well, and he exited after only four innings – he’d given up four runs in that span, with three of them coming in the fourth inning.

The thing that bothers me the most about Matusz’s outing tonight is that he threw 96 pitches, but only 52 for strikes. That’s about 54%, which isn’t too bad, but when you’ve walked four and you’ve only struck out one, it’s a bit of a glaring statistic. In that span, he saw 21 batters – comparatively, Ivan Nova, the starter for the Yankees, went seven full innings, saw 29 batters, and threw 92 pitches, 62 of which were strikes (67.4%). Big difference, considering that Nova had seven strikeouts.

To be fair, Matusz only gave up six hits, two of which came in the first, two of which came in the third (when no runs scored), and two of which came in the fourth. The fourth, Matusz’s bad inning, was an issue namely because Matusz walked too many people and there was an error from Nolan Reimold. Had Matusz’s pitch count not been as high, he might have been given a chance to work through that inning, but given that he’s coming off of surgery and other issues, yanking him was probably for the best, at least tonight.

On the positive side, Matt Wieters homered, doubled, and singled twice, so there’s that, at least. Sometimes, all you can do is look at the positives and be happy that they happened.