O's game blog: Jimenez looks for his first win as an Oriole

The Orioles will try to win another series today after losing the first game. That is hard to do, but the O's did it at New York and will try to do it this afternoon against Toronto. The Orioles have lost the series opener three straight times this, but the one time this year they won the first game was opening day and they then lost the next two to Boston. Ubaldo Jimenez tries to get into the good pitching column today. Suddenly the O's have some starters putting good outings together and it has been more than just Chris Tillman. In this series, O's starters have given up eight hits and no earned runs over 15 innings. Over the past three games the starters ERA is 1.29. Over the last six games, that ERA is 2.77 with four quality starts. Yeah, that's more like it. After his outing last night, Bud Norris talked about the rotation starting to get its act together. "We're going to get it going," Norris said. "Tilly is the lead dog and we're trying to catch up to him. He's a good guy at the front. But with Ubaldo (Jimenez), (Wei-Yin) Chen, (Miguel Gonzalez) and myself, we know we can go out there and do the job. These guys have pitched in the big leagues for a while now. It's a long season, 162 (games) is what we have to play and we just want to take it a game at a time." O's starters have thrown seven or more innings in back-to-back outings for the first time since Sept. 5-6 when Gonzalez and Scott Feldman did it. Mark Buehrle is off to a good start this season for the Blue Jays at 2-0 with a 0.64 ERA and the lefty has allowed just one run over 14 innings. But last year he was 0-3 with an ERA of 8.16 against the Orioles, who hit four homers and had 23 hits off him over 14 1/3 innings. So do the O's get the series win today? Ubaldo homer note: Jimenez gave up a solo homer to Colby Rasmus in the first inning today. At that point he had given up three homers on the year over just 11 innings. Last season after the All-Star break, Jimenez gave up just three homers in 13 starts and 84 total innings. The big inning: OK, it might be tough to win today. The Blue Jays just came up with their biggest inning of the year, a five-run sixth to lead 8-1. Jimenez went just 5 1/3 innings, allowing 10 hits and five runs. He gave up two more homers and now has a 7.31 ERA through three starts.