Rays keep fighting, but fall twice in a row

Rays fight – The Rays stretched their winning streak of avoiding back-to-back losses to five weeks—until Monday afternoon—when they dropped a 9-7, 13-inning walk-off to the Orioles after losing Sunday at Yankee Stadium on Aaron Judge’s walk-off homer. Tampa Bay’s fourth wa

When the Rays finally got their hands on a lead in the 13th on Monday afternoon, it felt like the kind of moment a team was supposed to protect.

They did everything—held the lead, answered every push, kept coming back. Then Jesse Scholtens walked back to the dugout after leaving a slider over the plate. and Colton Cowser went in for a walk-off 13th-inning home run. The Rays fell 9-7 to the Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. handing Tampa Bay its fourth walk-off loss of the season.

It was the second time in two days the Rays had been undone late.

On Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. Aaron Judge ended the series finale with a walk-off homer. and Monday’s ending came the same way: Orioles celebration. Rays disappointment. It had been about five weeks since the Rays last lost back-to-back games. and they had to reach Memorial Day with the American League’s best record anyway—34-17—despite losing consecutive games for the first time since losing three in a row from April 19-21.

Nick Fortes didn’t try to soften the sting. Catcher’s eyes stayed on the fight that kept showing up even when the score kept slipping away.

“That’s who we are as a team. Obviously, we’d love to come out on top, so it’s frustrating,” Fortes said. “But I mean, we’re never going to stop fighting. That’s just the brand of baseball that we play, so we’ll come back tomorrow and do the same thing.”

For a team that had so often been on the right side of close moments over the past two months, the last two losses carried an ugly lesson: the margin between winning and losing can be thin enough to slip away on one bad inning, one missed play, one pitch left in the wrong spot.

On Sunday, it took one pitch muscled just over the outfield wall by Judge. On Monday, it took longer—and more of it happened the hard way.

The Rays held the lead four separate times on Monday: 1-0 after six innings, 4-2 in the 11th, 5-4 in the 12th, and 7-5 in the 13th. Each time, the Orioles came right back.

Scholtens, who watched the game swing on the pitching side as Tampa Bay couldn’t keep the Orioles from capitalizing on chances, put it bluntly.

“It’s frustrating,” Scholtens said. “The offense, they gave us multiple chances to win the game today. We didn’t do our job on the pitching side.”

Shane McClanahan started the right way for the Rays, pitching well over 5 1/3 scoreless innings. Jonathan Aranda broke the score first with a solo homer in the sixth off Kyle Bradish, giving Tampa Bay an early edge.

But the seventh inning turned into the kind of inning the Rays couldn’t afford—sloppiness that let the Orioles climb back.

Leody Taveras walked, stole second, then moved to third on an errant pickoff throw by Hunter Bigge. Taveras scored on a single by Blaze Alexander. and Alexander came around to score the go-ahead run when Victor Mesa Jr. threw a two-out hit over third baseman Junior Caminero and into the camera well down the third-base line.

Manager Kevin Cash spoke after the Rays’ first four-error game since July 20, 2021, and he pointed directly to what went wrong at the start.

“[When] you’re in tight games, you’ve got to limit your mistakes,” Cash said. “And early on, we just didn’t do that very well.”

Tampa Bay fought back. They tied the game in the eighth on a double by Yandy Díaz and a single by Richie Palacios, and the night turned into a back-and-forth that kept forcing both teams to dig deeper.

Cedric Mullins, seeing the Orioles’ work undone and redone again, still kept his focus on the competitiveness.

“I liked the competitive nature that we had out there, liked the fact that we kept digging deep, kept digging deep every single inning,” Mullins said. “Just didn’t work out.”

The 11th brought more emotion.

Thrust into right-field duty due to injuries, Mesa crushed a two-run homer off Tyler Wells for his first hit as a Ray. For one inning, it looked like that would be the separator.

It wasn’t.

The Orioles answered immediately with sloppy defense of their own—capitalizing again and again. A Chandler Simpson throw home bounced into Adley Rutschman on the basepaths. leading to an RBI single that caromed off Caminero’s glove. In the 12th. a pair of long outs by Caminero and Aranda scored Simpson. and Cowser slid home safely after Aranda made an impressive stop on a hard-hit grounder by Gunnar Henderson. Cowser was initially ruled out, but replay review overturned the call.

Fortes was still dealing with the physical cost of the play when he talked about it. He described slamming the tag down, then twisting his left wrist in the process.

“I slapped the tag down as hard as I could,” Fortes said, adding that he twisted his left wrist on the play but was fine. “He just got in there.”

Even after all that—after the defensive mess, after the overturned call, after the Orioles kept manufacturing runs—the Rays still found a way to seize momentum again.

In the 13th, Palacios reached on a bunt single, and former Oriole Mullins went the other direction—reaching well out of the strike zone—to swat a go-ahead single to left.

Then it was Scholtens’ turn to lose the thread.

Returning to the mound in the 13th with a two-run lead, Scholtens gave up an RBI double and then a single that tied the game, followed by a game-tying sacrifice fly. Cowser fell into scoring position, Scholtens left a slider over the plate, and the walk-off ended it.

Cash didn’t ignore the result. He also didn’t pretend it was something the Rays lacked control over.

“I’m proud of the guys, the way they went about that game. There was a lot of back and forth, and both teams did everything they could to win,” Cash said. “We just came up on the short end of the stick. Appreciate Scholty’s efforts, for sure.”

Tampa Bay Rays Baltimore Orioles Oriole Park at Camden Yards Colton Cowser Jesse Scholtens Aaron Judge Nick Fortes Kevin Cash Shane McClanahan Jonathan Aranda