Zach Eflin won his second game in a row since joining Baltimore’s rotation, and Gunnar Henderson had three hits and an RBI as the Orioles ended Cleveland’s five-game winning streak, beating the Guardians 7-4 on Saturday night.
Eflin (7-7) slowed down the AL Central-leading Guardians by giving up only two runs — a two-run homer — and five hits in 6 1/3 innings. He was traded from Tampa Bay on July 26 in exchange for three minor leaguers.
“He made one bad pitch,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “Besides that, it was a professional effort — sinker, cutter, a bunch of strikes. Our fielders need to be ready. He gets a ton of ground balls.
“This is exactly what we’ve seen him do to us, honestly. He’s really tough to hit.”
Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman hit a pinch-hit, two-run triple in the eighth inning when the Orioles scored four runs to take a 7-2 lead.
Henderson broke a 2-2 tie with an RBI single in the fifth, helping Baltimore stay tied with the New York Yankees at the top of the AL East. After being outscored 18-7 in the first two games of the series, the Orioles came back with 15 hits.
“One of our better offensive games in a long time, just the quality of the at-bats, how hard we hit the baseball, using the whole field,” Hyde said. “We just did a lot of really good things offensively up and down the order.”
José Ramírez and rookie Angel Martínez hit two-run homers for the Guardians, who still have the best record in the majors at 67-43.
Ramírez’s homer in the eighth was his 29th and Cleveland’s 125th this season, surpassing the club’s total in 2023.
The Orioles were leading 3-2 and had runners at first and third in the eighth when Rutschman hit a liner to right that fooled rookie Jhonkensy Noel. When Noel slipped and fell, the ball rolled to the wall, allowing both runners to score, and Rutschman slid into third base.
“My first reaction was that I thought the ball was going to come in and obviously when I reacted what happened, happened,” Noel said. “You never want that to happen, but my mindset is to get every ball I can and unfortunately this one didn’t work out.”
