SEATTLE — The last time Grayson Rodriguez faced the Mariners, the Orioles starting pitcher handed the ball to his bullpen in the seventh inning with a 2-0 lead.
Tuesday night, Rodriguez handed the ball to his bullpen in the seventh inning with a 2-0 lead.
That’s where the déjà vu ended.
In May, Baltimore’s bullpen coughed up Rodriguez’s lead as Seattle came back for the victory. Tuesday, it was as resplendent as Rodriguez, maintaining the sophomore fireballer’s shutout to secure the Orioles’ 2-0 win. Rodriguez threw 6 1/3 stellar innings, allowing only two hits and striking out eight against a Mariners offense that is one of the majors’ worst.
“He’s just evolving as a major league pitcher,” manager Brandon Hyde said.
Baltimore is 54-31 and regains sole possession of first place in the American League East, up one game on the New York Yankees (54-33), who lost Tuesday. The triumph marks the Orioles’ seventh shutout this season and first since June 11 versus the Atlanta Braves.
“We won this game with pitching tonight,” Hyde said. “It shows you what kind of team we are. We can win in all different ways. We’ve hit a ton of homers and we’ve got speed on the bases and we can do little things, but you’re not going to score seven runs a night. You’ve got to be able to win low-scoring games like this.”
Rodriguez, who earned his team-high 10th win, tallied a career-best 19 swings and misses, eight on his 96 mph four-seam fastball and nine on his whiffling changeup. The Orioles’ No. 2 starter now has a 3.45 ERA for the season with two or fewer runs allowed in five of his past six starts.
In his start against the AL West-leading Mariners in May, Rodriguez carried a no-hit bid into the sixth inning and surrendered just one hit, an infield single. But the Orioles’ relief corps combined to allow four runs on six hits to squander the lead.
Baltimore’s bullpen didn’t have a repeat Tuesday, as sinkerballer Yennier Cano, southpaw Cionel Pérez and closer Craig Kimbrel didn’t allow any hits in 2 2/3 innings. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.
Kimbrel hit the first batter of the inning, and Cal Raleigh brought the announced 36,173 fans at T-Mobile Park to their feet with a mammoth blast to right field. The catcher clobbered a center-cut fastball 112.8 mph and 430 feet, but the would-be game-tying homer narrowly hooked right of the foul pole. Kimbrel struck Raleigh out on the next pitch, but the ninth got even dicier when Kimbrel plunked Jorge Polanco to bring the potential winning run to the plate with one out.
However, the veteran right-hander settled down, getting Dominic Canzone to ground out and superstar Julio Rodríguez to strike out swinging to seal the victory and the 437th save of Kimbrel’s distinguished career, moving him into a tie for fourth on MLB’s all-time list with former Oriole Francisco Rodríguez.
“I wanted it to hook, and it hooked just enough,” Hyde said. “You never want to hit two guys there in that inning, put the tying run on base, but Craig’s done this a long time and great job pitching out of it.”
Anthony Santander provided all the offense Rodriguez and his relievers needed with an RBI single in the fourth. The switch-hitter won the battle against Mariners starter George Kirby, fouling off five pitches before poking the right-hander’s 10th offering for a seeing-eye single. It’s neither June nor hot in the Pacific Northwest, but Santander is still hitting as if it were, carrying over his torrid performance last month into July. Cedric Mullins provided welcomed insurance in the seventh with an RBI single to knock Kirby out of the game, bringing in former Orioles relievers Austin Voth and Mike Baumann out of Seattle’s bullpen.
“They have a pretty good pitching staff,” Santander said. “There’s some games we don’t win by a homer, and as a hitter we have to try not to do too much, especially with runners in scoring position. We did that, and that’s how we win.”
The only thing that could have prevented Rodriguez’s scoreless night was his own defense. He almost spiked an easy throw to second base on a would-be 1-6-3 double play, an errant toss that nearly caused Ty France to slide into shortstop Gunnar Henderson’s legs.
Henderson miraculously corralled the ball on the ground to secure the forceout, deemed so after a review, and Rodriguez blew a 97.4 mph fastball past Raleigh to end the inning. The 24-year-old then let out one of his signature screams into his glove before strutting off the mound.
“Oh, amazing,” Santander said of Rodriguez’s performance. “I always love when he attack the hitters with his fastball. He has [an] electric fastball, 95 [mph] up to 100.”
In two starts against Seattle this season, Rodriguez has yet to give up a run and allowed just three hits with 15 strikeouts in 12 1/3 innings. The Mariners (47-40), carried by perhaps baseball’s best starting rotation, have the worst batting average in MLB at .217 — far below the league average .242 or the Orioles’ .255. Seattle’s lineup is also the easiest in the majors to strike out, doing so 10.2 times per game.
“Obviously, that’s a really good lineup over there, so I really needed it tonight,” said Rodriguez, whose four walks are why his pitch count reached 104, the second highest of his two-year career. “[Catcher Adley Rutschman] called a really good game. I think we had a really good plan going in. I faced them earlier this year in Baltimore, so I think we knew what we were getting into.
“That’s a playoff team. They’re loaded and we’ll probably see them in October.”
The Orioles have won five of their past six and are on pace for 104 victories, which would be their most since 1970. Baltimore won 108 games that year en route to claiming its second of three World Series titles.
Orioles at Mariners
Wednesday, 10:10 p.m.
TV: MASN2
Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM