Luke Scott went 3-for-4 last night in the Orioles' 6-5 loss to Toronto in eleven innings. While those are good stats, they don't seem overly out-of-the-ordinary. However dig a little deepr; there's always more than meets-the-eye! Two of those three hits were bunts! Remember last week when the O's played the Tampa Rays and Scott squared to bunt one time and that threw Tampa starter Jeremy Hellickson off to the point of walking Scott? That was no hoax as it turns out. Scott's been working on his bunting as a tool to use against teams that employ a defensive shift against him. In essence, the shift gives Scott the entire third base line because in general the spray charts have shown that he's nearly incapable of hitting the ball to that area of the field. However the one thing that teams would have never guessed Scott would do was to bunt.
Incidentally, these two bunts weren't the greatest bunts in the world. When you bunt for a base hit down the third base line generally you want the balll to hug the line and just die. These bunts were somewhat elevated and they weren't anywhere near the line. However given that there was nobody playing third due to the shift, it was exactly what Scott needed to do. I'm not saying that Luke Scott is the guy that Oriole fans would want bunting to move runners over late in games, but now he has another tool by which to get on base. When Scott bunted in the seventh inning he eventually came around to score as part of an Oriole rally. When he came up to bat in the eighth Toronto noticably curbed the severity of their shift so as to guard against a bunt. As a result, Scott straightened up and sent a line drive into right center. The fact that Luke Scott now has this in his arsenal is a win-win for the Orioles. Teams might now think twice about employing a shift, and/or walking someone to get to Luke Scott to employ a shift. Furthermore, Scott will see a few more high balls as pitchers guard against the bunt. Luke Scott's a high ball hitter; and if he lays off some of those pitches, he'll draw more walks.
That said, the Birds dropped last night's game to the Blue Jays 6-5 on Adam Lind's walk-off homer in the last of the 11th. This marked the 15th straight loss at Rogers Centre for the O's, who now find themselves four games under .500. I always find it interesting when I see these kinds of streaks in baseball. It makes no sense to me that the players would go into these games knowing that they had lost 14 or 15 straight games in that ballpark. Yet it would be hard to argue against the fact that they've now lost 15 straight at Rogers Centre. In the case of last night's game, at the very least the O's battled through the game and didn't just roll over as they did many times last year. With the Birds trailing 5-3 in eighth inning, Matt Wieters sent a moonshot into the mezzanine level at Rogers Centre to knot the game at five. Unfortunately, Adam Lind followed suit in the last of the 11th. Power wasn't the issue for the Birds last night, however they need to hit better in the clutch. I would recommend that they take care of this losing streak in Toronto and the now three-game losing streak overall because they're going to lose some power in surrendering the DH starting Friday in Washington.
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