Saturday afternoon Orioles game thread: at Red Sox, 1:05

Mar 18, 2023 - 5:00 PM

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In a stroke of good fortune, the Orioles are playing a spring training game today, Grayson Rodriguez is pitching, and this game will actually appear on one of the two channels for the Orioles-owned television network, MASN. This is a rare treat in Birdland for the month of March, so hopefully we can enjoy it.

It’s a road game for the Orioles and they’re going to be carrying the NESN feed for video, but it’s still going to have familiar voices belonging to Melanie Newman and Dave Johnson describing the action. It’s more than we’ve gotten for a lot of games in the last few weeks. The game will also be on the flagship radio stations in Baltimore on 97.9, 101.5, and 1090.

Are you going to get to see an exciting lineup on top of getting to see Rodriguez pitch? Well...

Orioles lineup

1. Adam Frazier - 2B
2. Ramón Urías - 3B
3. Ryan Mountcastle - DH
4. Kyle Stowers - LF
5. Austin Hays - CF
6. Ryan O’Hearn - 1B
7. James McCann - C
8. Nomar Mazara - RF
9. Jorge Mateo - SS

If anything like this lineup is fielded during the regular season, a number of things have probably gone horribly wrong. As spring training lineups go, it’s not terribly interesting either, because it’s not like it’s even stocked with prospects for a road game. It does, at least, have the requisite number of big leaguers to avoid the ire of the commissioner’s office, if they’ve ever actually directed ire at anyone for sending too many scrubs on the road.

I’m going to be a downer briefly. Rodriguez’s results so far this spring training haven’t been very good. There have been exciting-sounding velocity readings and some individual good strikeouts, but the 5.87 ERA is definitely in “Have to comfort yourself that none of it matters yet” territory. Indeed, it doesn’t matter yet. There are just only one or maybe two more tune-up starts before it does start to matter.

If things go well for Rodriguez today against a divisional opponent that’ll probably have its good lineup in the home half of its split squad day, that would be a fun way to start turning those results around. Then we can just all start wondering what the Orioles are going to do to manage his innings this year. I’m still hoping that they begin the season with Rodriguez in the starting rotation and figure out the rest from there.

Red Sox lineup

1. Christian Arroyo - 2B
2. Rafael Devers - 3B
3. Adam Duvall - CF
4. Triston Casas - 1B
5. Rob Refsnyder - RF
6. Bobby Dalbec - SS
7. Reese McGuire - C
8. Raimel Tapia - DH
9. Greg Allen - LF

Pitching for Boston, at least initially, will be Kutter Crawford.