How does a team with nothing to lose still manage to lose like this?
On Thursday night at Nationals Park, the Orioles fell 4-2 and dropped a league-high 52nd game that was made all the more puzzling in the way they almost avoided that fate.
After a returning Colby Rasmus, whose presence on the roster after an 11-week disabled list stint baffled much of the Orioles clubhouse, started one of the team's best defensive plays of the season with a double play from right field to home plate on a tag play to end the seventh inning, a tiring Mychal Givens allowed a pair of runs to on a double to 19-year-old Juan Soto to put the Nationals ahead for good in the eighth inning.