Daybreak Dose: Buck Showalter drops the ball for Baltimore

Or will it be Buck Showalter, after he’s roasted all the way around the Beltway for leaving Jimenez in rather than bringing in Zach Britton?

“I liked the job that Darren could do, I liked the job that Brad (Brach) could do, I liked the job that Mychal (Givens) could do, I liked the job that Duensing could do”.

Showalter still is one of the top managers in the game.

Campus was set ablaze in a wave of orange, black and white as devout Baltimore fans sported their colors for the game as the Orioles (89-73) were set to take on the Toronto Blue Jays (89-73).

Each of those six were asked by Orioles manager Buck Showalter to preserve a 2-2 tie in a game that went into the eleventh inning at the Rogers Centre last night. That Showalter was prepared to enter the offseason without putting his best pitcher on the mound was process. He’s a three-time American League Manager of the Year, and he has been working in baseball in some capacity since he broke into the minors all the way back in 1977. Britton is the guy the Blue Jays would have wanted to see least in the eighth, ninth, 10th or 11th inning.

Britton had a 0.54 ERA in 67 innings this season and has been so good that he will get a lot of love in the AL Cy Young voting.

Instead of turning to Jiminez, Showalter could have called on Zach Britton, probably the best reliever in baseball.

But let’s consider the situation in an attempt to be as kind to Showalter as possible.

The interesting thing about Jimenez is that this didn’t shine through in his more traditional stats this year. But Showalter stuck with Jimenez, trusting him to keep the Blue Jays off the board, which would keep Britton in reserve for a shut-down save if the Orioles could get a lead. O’Day then stayed on to get through the lower part of the order in the tenth. The result was an Edwin Encarnacion walkoff home run and a 5-2 loss to end the O’s season. By way of comparison, Bautista has two singles, a double and nary one RBI in 38 career at-bats versus Jimenez, while Encarnacion has an OPS of.726 against him in 41 at-bats. In 2003, albeit at home, Joe Torre used Rivera for three innings of Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. Bundy was on the game’s roster for a reason and honestly I’m more surprised he didn’t pitch than Britton. “It didn’t work out”.

Tuesday night, that bond was broken. Keep in mind, though, it was only O’Day’s second double play induced in 23 opportunities this season.

Orioles catcher Matt Wieters says Britton “has one of the most electric pitches in the game”.

Wallace, who took over as the Orioles pitching coach after the 2013 season, spent three years with the club, giving him 36 years in professional baseball. It’s a shame that his decision not to use Britton will haunt him for the foreseeable future. He also defended using all of the other relievers in the team’s bullpen (he used seven pitchers total in the game).

The sudden ending to this game was brought about by Showalter’s mismanagement.

I got the feeling that Showalter knew he screwed up, but there was no way he was going to admit it.

Then again, we’ve been here before.

It’s some of those relationships, he said, that make a return in some capacity to the Orioles organization appealing to Wallace.

Since July 1, the Orioles batted.240 and scored 340 runs, an average of 4.1 per game.

Gibbons’ big call was starting the game with Marcus Stroman, the fiery little righthander who will tell anyone who will listen how much he lives for pitching in big moments.