The Orioles Got Swept In Disgusting Fashion By The Twins, But It's Refreshing To See Manny Machado Get Fired Up About It
MASN - “What do you think happened?,” Machado said. “We lost, plain and simple. Go back out there and play shortstop again and get the opportunity to come back and help the team win again. We lost the game in the ninth inning. Bloop hits, little ground balls. Shit ain’t going our way. Have to keep our head up.” Machado had not played shortstop since the 2012 season with Double-A Bowie. Did the long time between games playing there hurt him on that play? “No, I missed the ball, plain and simple,” he said. “There are no excuses here. I missed the fucking goddamn ball and that’s it. We are not going to give any excuses. We missed those balls and we lost the game there in the last inning. Have to keep your head up. We should have won that game in the ninth inning and they keep hitting those rollovers. Now we have to face K.C., a strong team that is playing well. We have to go there and win games.” ….. What did Machado think when he was moved to short for the top of the 12th? “Just go out and play,” he said. “I should have made the play. I didn’t. But, hey, I hope he gives me another opportunity to go out there and win and get back this loss that we had. “I was just trying to make a play and I missed it. I whiffed on it. I know you guys are going to start writing all the stats and velocity of the ball. Man, this shit is baseball. It’s fucking baseball and we have to go out and catch the fucking ball and that’s it. Really nothing to it.”
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Finally. Finally somebody in the O’s locker room is showing some frustration at this team’s struggles. The past few years, Buck Showalter instilled a mentality, and Adam Jones has echoed that as the leader of the clubhouse. The message is always “aw shucks, we’ll get em tomorrow, it’s a long grind blah blah blah”. Well no more. There’s a time and place for those sentiments, but that time has come and gone. It’s almost September. The idea of wiping the slate clean and focusing on the next one remains true, but it’s lunacy to sit here and say it’s all rainbows and unicorns right now. It’s not. Just like a few weeks back when the O’s got swept in NY, the ship is taking on water. The problem now is that they don’t have a cushy stretch of games to fall back on now.
What’s even worse is that JJ Hardy is on the shelf for at least a couple of weeks. That leaves either Ryan Flaherty’s lackluster bat in the lineup, or a defensive liability at 3B if Buck chooses to keep Manny at SS (which has already proven to be a liability in itself). So yes, it’s panic time. And after weeks and weeks and weeks of being told this team was fine, it’s refreshing to hear somebody take some accountability and admit that things aren’t okay. Whether or not you think that Duquette has built a playoff-caliber roster is irrelevant at this point. This weekend’s losses were nobody’s fault but the players, and they needed to take responsibility of that. It’s been overdue. Too many games have slipped away this season in a similar fashion for them to be able to look in the mirror and blame anyone but themselves.
So yeah, big picture, the O’s are just 2 games out of the wild card and this thing is far from over. Fortunes can certainly change. But the first step to turning this thing around and getting a goddamn job done is to stop being in denial about it. It’s time to stop feeding us fans bullshit that everything is peachy and go do something about it. And even though yesterday’s loss can likely be pinned on Manny as much as anyone, I think he showed the type of leadership and passion that the O’s need to get them going. Maybe they’ll get there and maybe they won’t. That’s why they play the games. But regardless of the outcome, I’d much rather root for a team in September that appears to give a damn about where they’re headed, and it was a good sign to see somebody show some emotion for once.