The rules of baseball say that a team has to play 162 games in a season. This obligation is something of a curse for a team that is as bad as the Orioles are in 2018. Many games in the waning weeks have been almost completely meaningless, with not even some token excitement from young players to give the slightest shred of hope for the future.
On Friday night, the Orioles played another one of these games and lost to the Yankees. They had to play this game because that’s what the rules say.