The New York Yankees beat the Baltimore Orioles 6-1 Thursday night at Camden Yards, completing a three-game sweep as Gerrit Cole dominated through six innings and Luis García Jr. and Spencer Jones each homered to pace the offense.
Cole allowed just one earned run on four hits while striking out eight across six innings to earn the win. Jones went 3-for-4 with a home run and two runs scored, and García Jr. matched him with a 3-for-4 line, a home run, and two runs scored. Jazz Chisholm Jr. added an RBI triple in the eighth, and Ryan Yarbrough closed it out with three hitless innings, striking out four, for the save.
New York broke the game open in the third, and a costly defensive mistake made the inning far worse than it needed to be. With runners on first and third and nobody out, Jackson Holliday fielded a José Caballero grounder and threw to Gunnar Henderson at second for a potential double play. Henderson was already turning to fire the relay to first, and in trying to complete the double play, he never secured Holliday's throw cleanly — the ball got away, everyone was safe, and a run scored that shouldn't have. Kyle Bradish, who needed 38 pitches just to escape the inning, allowed a Ben Rice RBI single and a Heliot Ramos RBI double right after, and New York led 3-0 before Baltimore had recorded a hit.
"That error hurt a lot," manager Craig Albernaz said afterward. "[Bradish] threw a lot more pitches than he should have, and that cascading effect was real."
Dylan Beavers provided the only Baltimore offense of the night with a solo home run to right field in the fifth, his second homer in as many days, cutting it to 3-1. Cole retired 11 straight Orioles at one point and didn't allow much else, and García Jr. and Jones each went deep off Bradish in the sixth to end his outing — he finished with three earned runs, two unearned, and eight hits allowed across 5.2 innings.
Baltimore's bigger problem was an offense that simply couldn't deliver with the game on the line. The Orioles finished the series 0-for-16 with runners in scoring position, going 0-for-6 in each of the first two games and 0-for-4 in Thursday's finale. Pete Alonso was the lone multi-hit Oriole, going 2-for-4 and extending his hitting streak to a career-high 12 games, but Baltimore managed only six hits as a team.
The loss drops Baltimore to 61-67, six games under .500 for the first time since July 11, and two games behind the Minnesota Twins in the race for the final AL wild-card spot — a position the Orioles held outright just days earlier after taking three of four from Tampa Bay the weekend before. The Orioles host the Rays for a three-game series starting Friday, looking to arrest a four-game losing streak against the same team they beat up on a week ago.