Alonso hits two more HRs in 10-2 Orioles win over Yanks

This just in, ladies and gentlemen: Pete Alonso is really good at baseball.

The Most Valuable Oriole continued to be the best thing to happen to this franchise in a long time, adding two more homers to his league-leading total in a 10-2 blowout win to open a doubleheader against the Yankees.

Whatever other things have gone wrong for the Orioles this year — and oh boy, are there many — Pete Alonso has been worth the price of admission all by himself. Tonight, even in a game that had no meaning for either team, he proved why.

Alonso stepped to the plate with a man aboard in the third against Yankees starter Brendan Beck, who'd begun the game with two scoreless innings. Pete put an end to that real quick. He drove a 407-foot dinger into the left-field seats, his 42nd of the year. At that point, Alonso's last seven hits had all been dingers. Did I mention this guy is good at baseball?

The Orioles turned the game into a laugher in the fourth even without Pete being prominently involved (though he did get a single). The O's loaded the bases with nobody out for the soft underbelly of the lineup, including Christian Franklin and Carlos Narváez , who entered the game with a combined zero RBIs in 132 plate appearances with the Orioles. That's Caleb Joseph territory right there. Franklin managed to get off the schneid with a sharp single to right, collecting his first major league RBI, but Narváez remained in his drought by hitting into a force at the plate.

It shouldn't be that hard to get one measly RBI, Carlos. Just watch as Dylan Beavers gets four of them in one at-bat! The O's right fielder jumped on a hanging curveball from Beck and clobbered it into the right-field seats for his first career grand slam. Beavers! With one mighty swing, the Orioles had an insurmountable 7-0 lead.

The Birds' victory was all but assured, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have some more fun along the way. In the top of the sixth, Jeremiah Jackson lofted a fly ball to deep center field. Spencer Jones loped back at an ambling pace, as if he had the ball tracked all the way, but when he reached up to make the catch, it glanced off his glove and deflected to the wall. The ball trickled along the warning track for so long that Jackson just kept circling the bases, and by the time the Yankees got the ball into the infield, Jackson had slid in safely with an inside-the-park home run.

Look at the wheels on Jeremiah! If you'd told me that the Orioles would have two inside-the-parkers this season and they'd be hit by Coby Mayo and Jeremiah Jackson, I'm not sure I would've believed you. This has been a strange season, occasionally in good ways.

You know what's not strange? Pete Alonso being awesome. It's just what he does, and always has. Alonso led off the seventh against reliever Yerry de los Santos and absolutely demolished a baseball. Holy smokes, was it tattooed, a mammoth blast the landed high into the left-field bleacher seats.

Pete, that baseball had a family! The blast was his second of the game and AL-leading 43rd of the year, and extended his AL-leading RBI count to 112. In all likelihood, Pete is going to take two of the three Triple Crown categories. He won't win AL MVP, and I'm not saying he should, but…is there any player in the American League who's really that much better than him? I'd put him in my top five for sure.

This game was all Orioles, but if there was one disappointing aspect, it's that Trevor Rogers didn't get the chance to earn the win in what may well have been his final start as an Oriole. Rogers pitched brilliantly tonight as always, but the Orioles, in an apparently pre-planned move, removed him from the game after four innings and 55 pitches.

I mean…why? Rogers was showing no signs of fatigue. He mowed down the Yankees in the first four frames, throwing 41 strikes and just 14 balls. He allowed only one run, on an Amed Rosario RBI single in the fourth, and the O's had a comfortable six-run lead when he left. Was his arm really going to fall off if he threw more than 55 pitches in his final start of the season?

I will grant that he'd already thrown a career-high 169.2 innings this season, and perhaps the Orioles saw no reason to push him in a meaningless game, but I would've let him at least pitch one more inning to get a W next to his name. Mostly I just don't want to accept that this might've been the last time we see Rogers in an Orioles uniform.

The Orioles hit double digits in runs on Gunnar Henderson 's RBI single in the eighth that deflected off the second baseman, and the bullpen took it from there. Albert Suárez , now in his sixth stint with the Orioles this year, did his usual quality work in long relief. He tossed four scoreless innings and struck out five, even despite a nosebleed that afflicted him in the eighth. Suárez has been an unsung hero of the O's bullpen, constantly eating up innings without complaint even when he knows he'll probably get DFA'd the next day, then inevitably returning to the roster to do it all over again.

Alex Hoppe 's ninth inning was a mess — 22 pitches, two walks, and a run — but a nine-run lead gives you plenty of wiggle room, and he eventually finished it with a called strikeout of Ben Rice . Orioles win, 10-2. Not a bad way to start the weekend.