It was nothing short of curious that Craig Albernaz would opt to give a 23-year old kid who had barely worked as a reliver in the minors his MLB debut in a 2-2 game in the worst pitching park in MLB, but also totally in character for him.
He’s performed like an overmatched puppet all season – the third handpicked novice baseball exec Mike Elias installed in eight years – and as the moments got bigger for the Orioles on this winning tear to potentially make something of their season, you just knew the skipper would come up small. Giving Luis DeLeon the 7th inning right after Baltimore tied the game was dubious enough.
But he also chose not to keep Coby Mayo’s hot bat in the lineup, newly acquired $5M waiver claim Luis Robert Jr. play at all – the lineup came out ridiculously late, in hopes he might one assumes – and we got the return of Heston Kjerstad to the majors for the first time since June 2025 before we’d see Robert make his Orioles debut. Yeah, one is a lefty and the other is a righty – I get the match-ups of it all – but Albernaz didn’t handle this like the playoff game it was, his suspect lineup came up short again and the Orioles lost, 4-2, to lowly Colorado at Coors Field.
“We had a bunch of guys down because of the workload,” Albernaz said, trying to explain why this kid got his debut in that spot.
Of course, this being Albernaz, wonderfully out his depth, he couldn’t even stick to his own story, again, as before the game he said of De Leon: “We’re not going to ambush him and throw him in the fire right away.”
A victory would have taken them above .500 for the first time since April 14 and secured their second five-game win streak of the season, but Albernaz chose to get experimental instead. They fell to 69-70 and 1.5 games behind the Guardians for the final Wild Card spot.
Kyle Bradish, staked to a $100M contract extension, continued to show obvious signs of having not pitched even 40 innings either of the last two years due to Tommy John surgery, and labored to escape five innings, and Elias better get serious about a six-man rotation NOW,
The Orioles barely scratched out two runs Monday in Colorado against a bad starter and horrible staff, needing Colton Cowser’s miracle catch to negate a game-winning homer. They were worse Tuesday against an even worse starter (Gabriel Hughes this time).
They scored once Tuesday with Pete Alonso staying in a pickle long enough for a run to score. The other came off Jackson Holliday’s bat, a solo homer to tie the game (he had three hits against the Rockies, one of his father’s former teams, after a great series start in St. Louis, where his dad, Matt, also starred).
But Holliday dropped an absolutely routine pop up to start the seventh, with De Leon making his first pitches ever on an MLB mound and only recently converting to the pen in preparation for what he projects to here. Mickey Moniak wheeled all the way to second and two batters later TJ Rumfield hammered a center-cut slider for a two-run lead.
The O’s were lucky it wasn’t worse and Bradish was lucky he was facing a bad team (Colorado snapped a 10-game losing streak at home).
Bradish couldn’t miss bats, again (8 swing and miss), and he couldn’t throw enough strikes and he was pitching out of jams starting in the first inning. Albernaz left him out to dry last time out when he was clearly not right after consecutive walks and he needed 95 pitches to survive five innings here. Bradish threw 48 sinkers (more than half his total) and got a total of eight called strikes and whiffs with that pitch. That won’t play, and is troubling.
“Battling command a little bit,” is what Albernaz mustered, still probably not seeing Bradish’s situation for what it is.
Bradish isn’t getting any ground balls (two in this game) and he’s allowed 47 hits in 34 2/3 innings over his last seven starts, allowing five homers in that span. He has just 27 strikeouts in those starts and he and Brandon Young and Wednesday’s starter, Trevor Rogers, are all showing serious signs of fatigue.
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