There’s really not much we were able to learn from this game – nothing we didn’t know happened.

Except for Mark Reynolds scoring runs, because that hasn’t happened much lately and it’s nice to see him breaking out. Go and watch the video of him homering. He did it twice tonight. One of them brought in three runs. The entire offense was clicking in the sixth inning, in which the team brought in a hefty five runs at once (against Beckett and Melancon), but it was Reynolds who really capped everything off. He made everything very sparkly and nice.

Josh Beckett continues to be really bad at baseball this year, so I got to put a really bad golf pun in the title, which pleases me. It’s certainly convenient for the no-longer-a-fluke Orioles – this team is definitely good, since it’s August now and they’re still playing at this level. A few years ago, I would’ve never wanted to face a pitcher like Beckett. He was in his prime and was one of the reasons the team won the 2007 World Series. It’s sad to watch players decline after they hit that apex of their careers, but some people handle it better than others, and Beckett is one of those people who isn’t handling it well.

To be fair, I had a feeling he wouldn’t handle it well since he’s always seemed immature to me, but that’s a story for another time.

Oh, but our starting pitcher on the night?

I think we all know how I feel about this.

If you don’t know how I feel about the battery relationship and how important it is to a baseball team, go and read my review of Oofuri here. That was the show that first hammered the concept into me, and that hasn’t changed – if the pitcher and the catcher don’t see eye to eye, the whole team’s going to be thrown off kilter. There’s more emphasis placed upon that relationship in Japan than there is here, and since Wei-Yin Chen left his native Taiwan to pitch in the NPB for some time before coming here, it makes sense that he absorbed the concept of battery as it’s seen in Japan before he joined the Orioles. He clearly knows that it’s important and understands that a good catcher can make or break a pitcher.

This is going to turn into a rant on why I think batteries are so wonderful, so I think I should stop for tonight and just hope that the Orioles can repeat this performance tomorrow. Because this was pretty awesome.

FIRST PLACE. WE ARE IN IT. ALONE.

Yeah, I went there.

Wei-Yin Chen is back up to form – tonight he went seven innings, only allowing one run in the third on a sacrifice fly. Josh Beckett matched him through five, but the Orioles managed to tack on two runs in the sixth in an offensive explosion. I’m trying to think of a golf pun here, but golf isn’t the most explosive of sports, so I’m struggling.

There’s really not much else to this game – it was dominated by pitching for the most part. The Orioles have one more game in Boston before they head to the Land Of Pitching (TM), Philadelphia. To be fair, I’m not sure if I can really call it that right now since a lot of their pitchers are injured and poor Cliff Lee is still winless on the year, but the general idea is that at one point the Phillies rotation looked really stacked on paper. It’d be interesting to see if things actually played out the way they’re supposed to on paper – lots of pitching duels would be expected for the upcoming series. The problem is that Citizens Bank Park is the size of a sandbox, so a three-year-old T-ball player could homer there. Things really never work out the way they do on paper.

Let’s just finish up in Boston first before we think about any of this business, though. (If we sweep, I’ll be so entertained and confused. Really, really confused.)