Gleyber Torres socked a solo dinger in the fifth inning of Wednesday’s Yankees-Orioles game, a muscular, opposite-field job that just cleared the Camden Yards scoreboard. The blast put the Yankees up 7–2; they’d go on to win 7–5. There was nothing particularly special or noteworthy about this home run, except that it was the latest chapter in a genuinely remarkable story of one player mercilessly owning the crap out of a downtrodden division foe.
It was Torres’s second dinger of the game, which made Wednesday the fourth time this season that Torres has recorded a multi-home run game against just the Orioles. Torres now has 12 total dingers on the year, and ten of them have come against the Orioles. According to MLB.com, Torres becomes the first player in more than 60 years and just the fourth ever to record four multi-dinger games against a single opponent in one season, and the first player in MLB’s long history to record ten of his first 12 home runs against one opponent. Of course the opponent would be the 2019 Orioles, who have mastered the craft of serving up long balls.
To really appreciate the trauma caused by Torres’s abuse of Orioles pitching, it’s best to process the dingers as called by Orioles play-by-play man Gary Thorne. After the first one, a soaring shot to center in the third inning, Thorne sounded like a guy badly in need of a stiff drink:
As you can imagine, Thorne’s disgust and bewilderment did not improve at the sight of Torres’s second dinger of the evening clearing the scoreboard in right. This one features the sound of Thorne actually retching in disgust:
Torres’s two long balls were part of another five-dinger night for the Yankees, who have now hit an appalling 33 dingers against the Orioles in 11 games this season, versus the 40 they’ve hit against the entire rest of baseball. Ominously, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde is running out of ideas, having already exhausted the tell-the-pitchers-not-to-throw-it-down-the-middle approach:
The awful, heartbreaking news is, the Orioles still have eight games against the Yankees left on their 2019 schedule. If MLB can’t step in and stop this atrocity, at a certain point it will simply have to fall to law enforcement, if not the United Nations.