'This team has a lot of fight': Upcoming road trip crucial for O's

BALTIMORE -- The next time the Orioles play at home, a three-game set against the Blue Jays to close their regular season, it’s not clear what type of team they’ll be. They could be a postseason team, though the odds remain against them. Or they could be eliminated, their valiant come-from-nowhere efforts short of the ultimate prize.

No matter how they return to Baltimore after a final road trip through Boston and New York, they’ll have left a reinvigorated fan base with plenty to be happy about -- and wanting plenty more.

The Orioles closed out their penultimate homestand with an effort emblematic of their season, a gritty comeback ultimately gone for naught as the Astros played victor, 6-3, in this 11-inning rain-delayed affairat Camden Yards. A night after a blow-for-blow slugfest went Houston’s way, Sunday’s game of a similar yet far quieter nature did the same.

Rougned Odor tied the game with RBI singles in the eighth and 10th, but the American League’s top seed proved too much with an unrelenting four-run 11th of its own. Some luck, a few bounces and changed results on Saturday and Sunday could have made the Orioles’ flight to Boston a far happier occurrence with the postseason more a realism than a mirage.

“It's very disappointing,” said Orioles manager Brandon Hyde. “We should have won the game last night, and we had an opportunity to win the game today.”

“We persevered and persevered but those guys, they kept fighting and fighting,” added Astros manager Dusty Baker. “They wouldn’t go away.”

That backdrop that made Sunday -- and Saturday along with it -- all the more disappointing is that the Orioles relinquished a chance to make up ground on the Mariners for the third and final AL Wild Card spot. Baltimore remains four back of Seattle -- which lost on Sunday -- with 10 games to play, a mark that, truthfully, sits at five since the O’s would have to finish the year with a superior record having lost the head-to-head tiebreaker.

The Mariners’ magic number to clinch the Wild Card -- thereby the Orioles’ elimination number -- stands at six.

“That's baseball,” said starter Austin Voth. “We've got ups and downs, and you've got to show up the next day and continue to play. This team, time and time again, late in innings, is always fighting to try and get that ‘W.’ I have a lot of faith in us.”

The word “finish” has stuck out to Hyde through this more trying month of September. The Orioles are now 11-12 in the most crucial stretch of them all. Should a road trip to Boston and New York go haywire early, Baltimore will be playing for a more meager accolade in a winning record after five straight losing seasons and three 100-loss campaigns.

But aggravating the frustration -- both on Sunday and the season writ large -- is that opportunities fell by the wayside. On Sunday, specifically, it’s that uncharacteristic mistakes are what the Orioles felt were the difference from a more fruitful weekend.

As Odor lofted his game-tying single to deep right field in the eighth, he took a few seconds before running out the play, pulling into first base after the ball clanged off the out-of-town scoreboard. It may not have been a given that he would have reached second base safely had he sprinted on contact, but the lack of him in scoring position meant the back-to-back singles that ensued wouldn’t score him as the go-ahead run.

“I hit it off the end of the bat,” Odor said. “I was just trying to see if it was going to stay in the park or not.”

“Just made some mistakes,” Hyde said. “I felt like we made young-team mistakes the last couple games late in the game.”

The Orioles did close out their season with a 4-3 record against the Astros, impressive in that they held their vaunted lineup to just one run in the four victories. That kind of mojo is what the O’s can take into this final stretch. And should that not play out in their favor, into the offseason.

Mathematical probabilities waning, magical hope has yet to do the same. The Orioles have made their name this season in their tenacity. A year that was largely projected to be another in the rebuild, they have shown the expectations can be set aside.

No matter how they return to Camden Yards a week from Monday, they have shown the baseball world their might. Charm City has already been made aware of the chaos.

“I mean, anything can happen. We're right there. We've just got to come out tomorrow and keep fighting, and this team has a lot of fight,” Voth said. “I'm excited for this next series.”