The Orioles are legit, again. The Orioles won 101 games last year. The Orioles — who’d finished 40 games behind the Yankees as recently as 2021, when they’d lost 110 baseball games — finished 19 games ahead of the Yankees in 2023.
It was one of the most adorable stories in baseball in years until the Orioles collided with the runaway train the Texas Rangers had become in October, losing three straight in the AL Division Series, a quiet end to a big, boisterous year at Orioles Park at Camden Yards.
The Orioles are even better this year. They are 47-24, which is a pace for 107 wins. They are tied with the Yankees in the loss column, something that looks like a misprint given how dominating the Yankees have been across the first 2 ½ months of the season — a dominance that was notably interrupted from April 29-May 2, when the Orioles took three of four in Baltimore and held the fearsome Yankees offense to six runs in four games.
“I’m looking forward to it,” said Aaron Judge, who was revealed to be the leading All-Star vote-getter in all of Major League Baseball Monday afternoon. “Another great ballclub. I’m excited to see them in The Bronx. It’s going to be a fun series, and fans are going to be excited.”
They ought to be. There is something to be said about the near-certainty Yankees fans have enjoyed against most of the opponents they’ve squared up with this year, notwithstanding the unexpected weekend O-fer they took Saturday and Sunday in Boston.
You’ve mostly been able to set your watch by the Yankees. In another time, with another group of high-powered Yankees, the team’s owner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, famously said, “The perfect afternoon at Yankee Stadium? It’s when the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning and then slowly pull away.”
These Yankees have come awful close, on a lot of nights, to honoring that brash decree, and there’s a time and a place for a timely homestand against the Twins, against the Tigers, against the White Sox.
But there’s also something to be said about playing three games like this which will bring us all right to the doorstep of summer, three games against the one team in the American League that seems hellbent on pushing the Yankees across every day of summer, on into the fall. If it seems inevitable that there’s to be an October collision between these teams that will be the only thing anyone remembers, that’s fine too.
Those were the ground rules against the Red Sox every year, too, at that point in this ancestral rivalry when they were the clear Alydar and Affirmed of the American League. Octobers provided the most drama. But Sox-Yanks was every bit as entertaining — and every bit as much of a shadow box — when the games took place in those years in April, June and August.
“It’s a really good team,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said after Sunday’s 9-3 loss at Fenway Park. “They’re very complete. They’ve had some injuries happen to their rotation, but their depth has served them well. They continue to get good starting pitching. They’ve been able to close out games. And they have a versatile and dynamic offense. They can beat you with power, beat you with speed, they can match up against you.”
Boone was talking about the Orioles, but he easily could’ve been describing his own team, too, across the board for the season’s first 74 games, and that’s what makes this series so intriguing.
The Orioles can match up against the Yankees and the Yankees can match up against the Orioles, and that’s meant a lot of days and nights — a lot of weeks, actually — where if the Yankees were so inclined to look at the out-of-town scoreboard they’d notice the Orioles winning again, and if the Orioles were similarly inclined they’d see the Yankees up 7-2 on some overmatched club. Again.
For now in the American League, it is the Yankees and the Orioles, and the Orioles and the Yankees. The Guardians are only one game back in the loss column, but we’ve already seen plenty of the AL Central. We know all about the Yankees’ 17-2 mark against the AL JV; the Orioles are also a healthy 11-2. And is anyone truly scared about how well the Mariners are playing out West?
No, until proven otherwise it’s the Yankees and the Orioles in one place, and everyone else in the other. Which is why watching them play baseball against one another in the same place the next three games ought to be such a delight.
“I think it’s going to be a good one,” Yankees catcher Jose Trevino said. “Coming back to The Bronx, after a road trip, facing a good team it’s going to be fun.”
He’s right about that. See you there.
