Baltimore Orioles at St. Louis Cardinals

ST. LOUIS – One night after trouncing the Cardinals by a dozen runs in the first game of a three-game set, the Orioles exploded out to a seven-run lead before the end of the second inning. As much as the outburst must’ve felt like another preordained victory, the Birds instead had to bounce back from a mid-game letdown to come away with a tighter-than-expected 8-7 victory. Christian Encarnacion-Strand’s ninth-inning double marked the second four-hit game of his career, and stood as the game-winning RBI. Luis Vázquez, selected to the active roster earlier in the day after Tyler O’Neill was placed on the injured list, pinch-ran for Samuel Basallo and came around with the winning run in his first big league action this season. “It’s maybe the first time this year we’ve been on the opposite end of that,” manager Craig Albernaz said. “It’s usually us clawing back, so it was a great test for us.” Leody Taveras delivered the first big blast of the night for the O’s, launching a three-run homer against Cardinals starter Michael McGreevy to put the exclamation point on a first-inning rally. Pete Alonso powered up for his second homer of the series in the second, this one an opposite-field shot that pushed him north of 90 RBIs for the sixth time in his eight big league seasons. One of the years he failed to reach that mark was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. In the other such season, 2024, he tallied a mere 88. Kyle Bradish had to grind on a sweltering summer evening and was ultimately unable to finish the fifth inning of his start, needing 91 pitches to complete just 4 1/3 innings. Bradish held the Cardinals to one run in the first four innings, surrendering a homer to Nolan Gorman, but he gave back five runs in the fifth before being replaced by Alex Hoppe. “I think early on they just hit some good pitches,” said Bradish, who added that consecutive walks to JJ Wetherholt and Iván Herrera put him in a difficult spot. “It’s a good hitting team, and then balls found holes in that fifth inning.”