BALTIMORE — The first two games of the Baltimore Orioles' series against the Kansas City Royals this weekend have been slugfests, with runners clogging the bases, home runs flying out of Camden Yards and final scores more fitting for football than baseball.
And one day after the Orioles put a hurting on the Royals with a 10-run eighth inning that included two grand slams against baseball's best bullpen, the Royals returned the favor Saturday. Kansas City sent the Orioles to a 14-6 defeat in front of an announced 35,439 after a season-high rain delay of 3 hours 2 minutes before the game began.
The Orioles' modest three-game winning streak — a spark of optimism as their postseason hopes have faded over the past month — was ended as the Royals scored 10 runs off the bullpen, not including two inherited runners who also scored, over 32/3 innings.
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Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas continued to crush Orioles pitching with a career day. He hit two homers, including a seventh-inning grand slam off left-hander T.J. McFarland, and finished with a franchise-record nine RBI.
“Nine?” Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy said when told of Moustakas’s RBI total. “That’s a pretty good month or week. What did we score? [Obviously] not enough.”
In six games against the Orioles this season, Moustakas is hitting .500 (12 for 24) with four homers and 18 RBI.
The Royals (84-57) scored five runs in both the sixth and seventh innings, quickly turning a 4-1 Orioles lead into an 11-4 deficit.
“We didn’t pitch well out of the ’pen obviously,” Orioles Manager Buck Showalter said. “A couple of games, I’m being nice when I say they weren’t crisp.”
The Orioles also left 12 runners on base.
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With any ambition of reaching the postseason fading, the Orioles (68-73) entered the day six games behind the second American League wild-card spot with 22 games remaining in the regular season.
Orioles starter Chris Tillman left leading 4-2 with two on and one out in the sixth, but the bullpen couldn’t hold the lead.
Left-hander Brian Matusz (1-4) failed to get the next two batters out, walking switch-hitter Kendrys Morales and allowing a two-run single to Moustakas to tie the score at 4. Right-handed reliever Chaz Roe then gave up an opposite-field two-run single to Salvador Perez to give Kansas City a 6-4 lead.
McFarland let five of the six batters he faced in the seventh score. He allowed back-to-back singles to Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist to start the inning, followed by Lorenzo Cain’s run-scoring double.
After McFarland induced a groundout from Eric Hosmer and walked Morales intentionally to create a force play at any base, he hung an 0-2 slider that Moustakas sent into the right-center field seats for an 11-4 Royals lead.
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