Mayo urges his teammates to harness their late-game resilience for the final stretch.
Coby Mayo didn't sound like a player trying to convince himself that Friday night's loss didn't matter. He knew it did.
With the Baltimore Orioles eight games away from the end of the regular season and still three games behind in the American League Wild Card race, Baltimore can't afford to treat many more losses as harmless. The 6-5, 10-inning defeat to the Milwaukee Brewers only made that reality harder to ignore.
But Mayo also wasn't interested in looking at the loss without considering how Baltimore got there.
The Orioles had already come back from a 3-0 deficit once before Milwaukee pushed ahead again in the ninth. Then, with the game seemingly slipping away, Baltimore put together another rally to tie it.
Mayo was right in the middle of it.
He doubled for the third time Friday night after Gunnar Henderson opened the ninth with a single. Both eventually scored on sacrifice flies from Samuel Basallo and Christian Encarnacion-Strand, turning a two-run deficit into another tie.
“Losing right now is tough,” Mayo told reporters postgame, via MASN. “Obviously, we did a great job rallying back. And you're going to have those games where you rally back and lose. You're going to have the games where you rally back and win.”
That distinction seemed important to Mayo.
The Orioles didn't get the result they needed, but the ninth inning gave him something else to point toward. Baltimore didn't panic after Milwaukee took a 5-3 lead. It found a way to create opportunities and convert them.
Mayo specifically mentioned the two sacrifice flies as part of what he viewed as a successful inning, even though the final result went the other way.
For a team with its season hanging in the balance, that perspective says something about how the clubhouse is handling the pressure.
Mayo acknowledged that the Orioles know exactly where they stand.
“There’s less than 10 games left, and we know what spot we’re in,” he said. “But I don’t think guys are putting more pressure on themselves.”
That doesn't mean the urgency isn't there. Baltimore entered Friday three games out of the final Wild Card spot and left in the same position, with three teams still sitting between the Orioles and a postseason berth.
There simply isn't much time left to change it.
Mayo's answer was to focus on what the Orioles can still control. He pointed to the team's at-bats and the chances it created against a Milwaukee club with baseball's best record, then admitted the Orioles didn't play their best game and still had a chance to win it.
“I think that shows how good of a team we are,” Mayo said. “We didn’t play our best baseball, and we still came up just a little bit short.”
That is probably the most revealing part of his postgame comments.
Mayo wasn't pretending Friday's loss was acceptable. He was saying the Orioles still saw something in it worth carrying into Saturday.
There are only eight more opportunities after that.
Baltimore will have to turn more of those opportunities into wins if it wants to keep its season alive. For now, Mayo's message is simpler. The Orioles need to keep giving themselves chances and hope that more of them finally go their way.
