Orioles wake up on Coby Mayo’s clutch home run to beat Yankees

The win over the Yankees is the Orioles’ first this year after they were swept in four games in the Bronx two weekends ago. The Orioles didn’t lead in any of the first 42 innings against the Yankees, but Mayo’s homer gave them an advantage for the past three that perhaps can be carried over into the rest of the series as the club hopes to dig out of its early hole. Baltimore is 19-23 and a whopping 8 1/2 games back of the Tampa Bay Rays atop the American League East and seven games behind the Yankees.

Orioles hitting coach Dustin Lind said on Sunday that the club’s struggles against lefty starters was mostly a result of randomness caused by a small sample size, urging that it would even out over the course of the season. But he also said that it could help that his hitters would face some of those lefties a second time, including Weathers on Monday.

“The nice thing is, we’ll get to see a lot of these lefties a second and third time,” Lind said. “We’ll be able to make adjustments based off of the previous outings and … come up with new game plans.”

The opposite happened.

Baltimore’s bats were lifeless through six innings. They drew a few walks to prevent the no-hit bid from being a potential perfect game, but Weathers struck out nine of the first 18 batters he retired.

The performance was similar to the one the Orioles put up against Cleveland Guardians southpaw Parker Messick in mid-April. Messick carried his no-hit bid into the ninth inning before it was broken up by Leody Taveras. That game marked the third time since 2024 that the Orioles had broken up a no-hit bid in the ninth inning, making them only the third team in MLB’s expansion era (since 1961) to do so in three consecutive seasons.

Monday’s no-hit bid didn’t get that far thanks to Rutschman. Had Weathers completed the no-no, it would have been the eighth no-hitter thrown against the Orioles since they moved to Baltimore in 1954. The last one was by the Seattle Mariners’ Hisashi Iwakuma on Aug. 12, 2015. The other two this century were by Boston Red Sox pitchers Clay Buchholz and Hideo Nomo on Sept. 1, 2007, and April 4, 2001, respectively.

Mayo’s blast gave the Orioles a lead thanks to starting pitcher Brandon Young and his bullpen. Aside from giving up a two-run homer to Ben Rice in the eighth inning, Young was excellent against one of the best lineups in baseball. He only allowed the two runs across 5 1/3 frames while striking out five. Dietrich Enns entered with one out and a runner on third in the sixth, but the left-hander stranded him to keep the Orioles down only two.

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