Wrapping up a loss in the series finale at Oakland

OAKLAND, Calif. - It is probably getting a little late in the season for the Orioles to take one step forward and then one back, but that is what they've been doing on their West Coast road trip.

Today looked good early. Coming off a 20-hit, 12-5 win Saturday night, they took an early 2-0 lead. They had seven hits before they had made an out in the third inning. But when Oakland scored five runs in the fourth, the Orioles momentum hit a brick wall.

They lost 9-3 to Oakland to split a four-game series with the team with the second-worst record in the league at 52-66. They are 3-4 on this road trip and 58-60 for the year.

Manager Buck Showalter usually won't look at any single game or series and feel it makes any statements about his team good or bad and he felt the same about this series and the current trip.

"We're going to Seattle, trying to win baseball games. Doesn't leave you here or there or whatever. You're always trying to say this means this and that means that. That means you're getting ready to play a baseball game tomorrow and try to win and finish up what could be a good road trip for us if we play well in Seattle," he said.

The Orioles provided right-hander Jeremy Hellickson with an early 2-0 lead on RBI singles by Jonathan Schoop and Chris Davis. Then he rolled through three innings on just 24 pitches.

But he needed 25 pitches in the fourth. Hellickson threw four consecutive changeups to right-handed hitting Matt Chapman and he hooked the fourth into the left-field corner for a three-run homer. That gave Oakland a 5-2 lead from which the Orioles did not recover today.

Showalter was asked about what happened to Hellickson's start.

"Most of the time we're supposed to have some answers," he said. "It's just one of those days. That was a strange...just kind of an Oakland game. He pitched well and they get the squibber off the end of the end of the bat. They really hit one ball hard, a little changeup he was trying to get underneath the bat and left it there. I thought he had good enough stuff."

Hellickson went five innings plus one batter and gave up five hits and six runs. He is 1-2 with an ERA of 4.50 through three starts for his new team.

"I can't give up the homer right there," Hellickson said. "He did a good job to go get it. It wasn't a terrible pitch, but I think I threw four in a row trying to...pretty much in the exact same spot. Probably should have mixed it up more that at-bat.

"Every game is big right now. When you lose you feel like you had to have that one. It's, I don't know, just frustrated right now."

That word probably fits best at this point. The Orioles beat the A's 7-2 Thursday and then blew a late lead on Friday. After all the offense last night and today's early lead, they wind losing by six runs and with a split rather than taking three of four.

"It's just we lost, plain and simple," Manny Machado said after a 3-for-4 day that included a triple and his 22nd home run. "There's no excuses for that. They came back and they played good baseball, too.

"We were missing pitches. We tried to get on top of stuff, but things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. We put a couple runners on base and he (Kendall Graveman) got out of big innings. There's nothing you can do about that," he said.

Late in today's game we saw two rare occurences. Chris Tillman made his first-ever major league appearance in relief and Zach Britton allowed his first homer since April 11, 2016.

Tillman got two outs in the both the seventh and eighth. He faced four batters and got them all out with two strikeouts on 20 pitches.

"Way different," Tillman said of pitching in relief after 194 MLB starts. "It was good though. I feel like it was a step in the right direction for me. Other than that, didn't really see much or do much. But was able to make a couple of pitches."

Britton gave up a solo homer to lefty hitting Matt Olson in the eighth to score Oakland's last run. He pitched 67 innings and gave up one homer last year and had thrown 22 1/3 innings this year without allowing one.

Now the Orioles look once again for that step forward as they fly north for a series that begins in Seattle on Monday night.

"We've just got to stick together, keep doing what we're doing," Machado said. "We've got a great team. We've got a great lineup. We've got a great pitching staff. Things haven't turned out the way we'd like them to be, but we're going to keep fighting until the end. We're not going to stop. That's the best thing we have. That's the best tool."