By the time Bruce Zimmermann returned to the Oriole Park mound for Sunday’s second inning, the Orioles’ best-laid pitching plans had already been undone. Monday’s off-day loomed on the horizon temptingly, like a faraway refuge. Yet when Zimmermann walked off 5 2/3 innings later, he did so to a standing ovation from the sellout crowd of 11,070, having stabilized Baltimore’s slapdash pitching staff’s shakiest week yet.

Zimmermann’s bulk-relief outing was integral to the Orioles snapping their four-game losing streak, allowing them to come back from an early four-run hole to capture Sunday’s series finale, 10-6, against the Yankees. Inheriting the deficit from opener Adam Plutko, Zimmermann retired 17 of 20 hitters in his first big league appearance since May 2, striking out six.

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In the process, he allowed the O’s to claw back on run-scoring hits from Ryan Mountcastle and Pedro Severino in the first, jump ahead on Trey Mancini’s double in the fourth, and pull away on Maikel Franco’s two-run homer in the seventh. Mountcastle added a two-run single in the eighth to put the game on ice.

“Great comeback from our guys,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “We’ve had a lot of tough losses these last few weeks, and I feel good for them to roll into an off-day with a win against the Yankees.”

The victory was made possible by a second impressive long relief outing by a young Orioles lefty in as many days, after Keegan Akin made his case for a rotation job by outpitching Jorge López on Saturday night. It’s not difficult to see both Zimmermann and Akin earning starts in the weeks to come, with the Orioles set to play 16 games in 16 games and committed to managing their starters’ workloads coming off the shortened 2020 season. Both also profile well for similar bulk-inning assignments. 

“It didn’t really change my mindset,” said Zimmermann, who had started his previous six big league appearances this season. “I was coming in and prepared to go the starter-amount of innings and to get back to bearing down on the zone. I don’t have an issue with that. It was nice to come in and go at them right away. It’s an interesting approach, and I’m all for it if we have to do it again.”

The issue for the Orioles lately has been their attempt to manage starter workloads without taxing their heavily used bullpen, while also operating with a four-man rotation. The rotation should expand to five after Monday’s off-day, but the balancing act will continue throughout the year, as will the roster juggling that brought Zimmermann and Akin back from the Minors to play key roles this weekend. Meanwhile, O’s starters own a 7.13 ERA in nine games since John Means’ May 5 no-hitter, seven of those losses.

(Also of note is the absence of pitching coach Chris Holt, who missed his second series this weekend due to an undisclosed personal matter. Hyde declined comment on Holt when asked Sunday morning.)

The result is a near-daily scramble to find innings. Every short start compounds the issue, as López’s two-inning clunker Saturday did. Sunday’s bullpen game stemmed from the O’s decision to push Means back due to workload concerns; they then recalled Zimmermann from Triple-A Norfolk and chose to open with Plutko, noting the Yankees’ right-handed-heavy lineup. 

It backfired immediately. Plutko entered play having surrendered just three runs in 21 1/3 innings as a reliever; he coughed up four in the first Sunday, courtesy of homers by Gary Sánchez and Clint Frazier. The O’s countered with two runs in the first and three in the third.

“I thought today was our best offensive approach we’ve had maybe all year,” Hyde said. “Then Bruce Zimmermann won us the game.”

To keep Zimmermann fresh, the O’s limited him to one Triple-A start in the past two weeks, notifying him Thursday that he’d be needed either Sunday or sometime in the coming week.

 The 26-year-old southpaw held the Yankees to one run -- another Aaron Judge solo homer, his fourth in three games this series and seventh in 2021 against Baltimore -- before handing the ball to the O’s bullpen. Zimmermann became the fourth Maryland-born Orioles pitcher to earn a victory at Oriole Park, and the first since Evan Phillips on Aug. 2, 2020, against Tampa Bay. 

“I saw his velocity ticked up a little bit today,” Hyde said. “It shows how the little bit of the rest did some good there. He stayed strong all the way through that outing.”