BALTIMORE -- If it hadn’t already been abundantly clear, the impact Corbin Burnes left on his old organization was plain to see again Friday afternoon, of which he spent a considerable chunk in or around the visitor’s dugout at Oriole Park. Giving hugs and shaking hands, Burnes enjoyed reunions with old teammates, coaches and friends he knew he’d be staring down from the mound in two short days’ time.

“Everybody wanted a piece of him,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “To wish him luck [going forward].”

Since the Brewers know Burnes so well, it came as virtually no surprise when those genuine niceties and nostalgia faded away entirely once Sunday came. What remained was also the Burnes they know: hyper-competitive, over-prepared and often downright nasty. Maybe that familiarity helped them battle Burnes like no other team this year, scratching out three runs (two earned) against their former ace before dropping Sunday’s series finale, 6-4, in the late innings.

“Whenever you’re facing a No. 1, you’re trying to do everything you can to pester him to get him off his game,” Murphy said. “I don’t know if we did that. He made some big pitches at some big times and gave his team a chance to win.”

The Orioles have now gone 96 straight regular-season series (of two games or more) without being swept, the longest such streak since 1947 and fourth-longest in AL/NL history. The Brewers came excruciatingly close to snapping that streak, but instead saw their four-game win streak snapped as Baltimore scored thrice in its final two turns at bat and Milwaukee watched its own rally fizzle against Craig Kimbrel in the ninth.

That spoiled a solid Colin Rea effort and the way the Brewers grinded against Burnes, whom William Contreras greeted with his first career leadoff homer. They used a run-scoring double steal and a Brice Turang bunt single that brought home a run on a Burnes throwing error to chase their former teammate after five laborious innings, before briefly pulling ahead on Blake Perkins’ homer in the seventh.

“He looked like the same ol’ Corbin,” Rea said.

It’s only been a little more than two months since the Brewers traded Burnes to the Orioles for Joey Ortiz, DL Hall and a 2024 Competitive Balance pick, altering the franchise’s direction significantly only about a week before Spring Training. It was Orioles general manager Mike Elias who made a point of publicly calling the deal “a great trade for both sides,” and it’s still early, but so far he seems to be right. Burnes is thriving, pitching to a 2.28 ERA and a quite silly 25-4 strikeout-to-walk rate through four starts in Baltimore. And the Brewers are still off to their third-best 14-game start in franchise history, and maintain the National League’s best record at 10-4.

“He’s well-respected by everybody in the organization, especially those pitchers who watched him go about it,” Murphy said. “He was a huge part of this organization and he’s done so much for us. He’s a great pitcher.”

Explaining his approach to the start, Burnes said: “It's friends that I played with in the past and they're former teammates, and it's the word ‘former’ for a reason. I'm here to win baseball games for the Baltimore Orioles and win a World Series for the Baltimore Orioles. I'm as frustrated as anyone else in here that we got our butt kicked yesterday."

Like DL Hall did Saturday for the Brewers, Burnes entered Sunday’s start entirely intent on not holding anything back facing his former club for the first time. And the Brewers didn’t expect him to.

“Obviously, that's where I got my start, got a second chance after '19, learned how to pitch, became the pitcher that I am today,” Burnes said. “Thankful for the time that I was there, and it gave me a lot of good baseball. That organization, we made the postseason for five years. A lot of good things that came out of my time there. But like I said, that's the past. We're living in the now and where our feet are.”