BALTIMORE — The Baltimore Orioles had no chance to get Bobby Witt Jr., sprinting with all his might toward the first base bag. Not with Witt’s 31.3 foot-per-second sprint speed. Not with second baseman Jordan Westburg needing to dive, gather the ball, and fire an inevitably one-hop strike.
It was close, sort of. But the second that ball left the bat, Witt was destined for first base — motioning the safe call himself, before the umpire could make it official.
The sport’s batting champion had come up with a runner at third. There were two outs. It was the sixth inning. And no, there is no need to check the date of this article. This was, nearly to a tee, the exact same predicament that Baltimore found itself in a day prior.
In both instances, Witt was pitched to. In both instances, he smacked a tie-breaking hit that proved to be the game winner.
Only four runners total crossed the plate over this tense two-game series. Witt drove in half of them.
“They brought me in to face that guy,” said reliever Yennier Cano said after the 2-1, season-ending loss. “That was what we spoke about. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the job done with the way the play turned out.”
The Orioles have lost 10 straight playoff games, dating back a decade. Their young, budding superstars looked hopeless at the plate the last two days. Gunnar Henderson flailing at a changeup just above the dirt was a fitting final image.
In a series with more offense, pitching to Witt wouldn’t be a controversial call. But in these two games, defined by a palpable desperation to score, it’s both easy and fair to second-guess keeping the bat in the hands of a .332-hitting MVP candidate. A batter who hit .388 with runners in scoring position.
“When you lose 10-2, there’s a lot that went wrong,” said Orioles veteran catcher James McCann, speaking more generally. “When you lose by one run, you can sit here and evaluate this pitch or that pitch. Or this swing or that swing. Or how differently a game could have looked if there was a different outcome on that pitch.
“You can’t do that in baseball, you just can’t. It’s easy to second guess.”
Walking Witt would have come with its own risks.
In Game 1, giving him a base would have effectively meant giving him two. Orioles pitcher Corbin Burnes struggles to hold runners on. And Witt’s speed, combined with Baltimore’s concern over the runner at third, would likely have resulted in an easy steal.
That, however, didn’t appear to be a part of the calculation.
“I’m letting Corbin Burnes, the way he’s throwing the baseball right there, determine who he wants to go get,” manager Brandon Hyde said Tuesday.
We did a good job the first two (times) against him,” Burnes said. “That cutter down and away, he took some pretty bad swings on it.”
In the decider, walking Witt would have loaded the bases in a tied game, presenting the risk of a far more perilous outcome. Multiple runs scoring. The season effectively ending. A Witt single, by comparison, is not nearly as bad.
In both instances, the next batter would have been Vinnie Pasquantino, who is also one of Kansas City’s biggest offensive threats. However, he’d only returned from a broken thumb before Game 1, and might not have been fully healthy, despite making some good contact in this Wild Card Series.
For the Orioles, it came down to who they wanted to let beat them: Witt with less traffic? Or Pasquantino with more. Baltimore opted for the former, and was burned both times.
“That’s the fun part of this game,” Witt said of his big at-bats. “This is why we do it, these situations here. Enjoy the moment because you never know when this opportunity is ever going to happen again.”
Therein lay the issue for Baltimore. Witt doesn’t know when that opportunity might come again, because it perhaps should never have come in the first place.
The Orioles will enter this offseason with many questions about how they move forward, and how they address the undeniable failures of the last two months. The list of issues is significant: Building a starting rotation; developing their highly-touted young bats; Stabilizing a bullpen without a clear-cut closer.
The in-game decisions were probably not what prevented this Baltimore team from making a World Series run. They’re not going to be what’s remembered about why this team failed. It’s those much larger, much more deep-seeded concerns that will linger longer.
“You lose like this, there’s frustration, there’s anger, there’s disappointment,” Hyde said. “Because you felt like there was opportunities. … We just had a tough time offensively these two games against a really good pitching staff and a scrappy team.
But beyond all of that, in the stinging aftermath of defeat, those two singles will leave people wondering how things might be different if Witt hadn’t been given the option to hit.
(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
