BALTIMORE -- It had been about five weeks since the Rays last lost back-to-back games. It took a lot to make it finally happen again Monday afternoon.
After dropping their series finale on Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium on a walk-off homer by Aaron Judge, the Rays were walked off again by the Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, this time on a 13th-inning home run by Colton Cowser off Jesse Scholtens that sent Tampa Bay to a 9-7 defeat, the club’s fourth walk-off loss of the season.
The Rays have lost consecutive games for the first time since losing three in a row from April 19-21, but they still reached the Memorial Day marker with the best record in the American League, at 34-17.
“That’s who we are as a team. Obviously, we'd love to come out on top, so it's frustrating,” catcher Nick Fortes said. “But I mean, we're never going to stop fighting. That's just the brand of baseball that we play, so we'll come back tomorrow and do the same thing.”
If anything, the Rays’ last two losses illustrate the narrow margin between winning and losing -- a reminder of how many times they’ve been on the right side of that equation the past two months.
Sunday’s game came down to a couple baserunning miscues and one pitch that Judge muscled just over the outfield wall. A lot more went into Monday’s four-hour and 12-minute affair, but it ultimately came down to the Rays’ inability to put the Orioles away.
The Rays held the lead four times on Monday -- 1-0 after six innings, 4-2 in the 11th, 5-4 in the 12th and 7-5 in the 13th. Each time, they let the Orioles back in.
“It's frustrating,” Scholtens said. “The offense, they gave us multiple chances to win the game today. We didn't do our job on the pitching side.”
Shane McClanahan pitched well over 5 1/3 scoreless innings, and the Rays struck first with a solo homer by Jonathan Aranda in the sixth off Kyle Bradish. But some sloppiness cost the Rays in the seventh, as Leody Taveras walked, stole second then advanced to third on an errant pickoff throw by Hunter Bigge.
Taveras scored the tying run on a single by Blaze Alexander, and Alexander came around to score the go-ahead run when Victor Mesa Jr. threw a two-out hit over third baseman Junior Caminero and into the camera well down the third-base line.
“[When] you're in tight games, you've got to limit your mistakes,” manager Kevin Cash said after the Rays’ first four-error game since July 20, 2021. “And early on, we just didn't do that very well.”
The Rays tied it up in the eighth on a double by Yandy Díaz and a single by Richie Palacios, and a back-and-forth contest rolled on.
“I liked the competitive nature that we had out there, liked the fact that we kept digging deep, kept digging deep every single inning,” center fielder Cedric Mullins said. “Just didn’t work out.”
Thrust into right-field duty due to injuries, Mesa crushed a two-run homer off Tyler Wells in the 11th inning for his first hit as a Ray. But the Rays gave those runs right back, as the Orioles capitalized on more sloppy defensive play, including a Chandler Simpson throw home that bounced into Adley Rutschman on the basepaths and an RBI single that caromed off Caminero’s glove.
A pair of long outs by Caminero and Aranda scored Simpson in the 12th, but Cowser slid home safely on a play at the plate after Aranda made an impressive stop on a hard-hit grounder by Gunnar Henderson. Cowser was initially ruled out, a huge swing in the Rays’ favor, but a replay review overturned the call.
“I slapped the tag down as hard as I could,” said Fortes, who twisted his left wrist on the play but added that he was fine. “He just got in there.”
The Rays again seized the momentum in the 13th, as Palacios reached on a bunt single before former Oriole Mullins reached way out of the strike zone to swat a go-ahead single to left -- a poetic ending, if only it had been.
Returning to the mound in the 13th with a two-run lead, Scholtens immediately gave up an RBI double followed by a single and a game-tying sacrifice fly. He fell behind Cowser, left a slider over the plate and didn’t even turn around to watch the ball before walking back to the dugout.
“I'm proud of the guys, the way they went about that game. There was a lot of back and forth, and both teams did everything they could to win,” Cash said. “We just came up on the short end of the stick. Appreciate Scholty's efforts, for sure.”