Domingo Germán’s follow-up outing to his perfect game didn’t go well Monday.
Germán, less than a week after he threw the 24th perfect game in MLB history, didn’t make it out of the fifth inning of the New York Yankees’ 6-3 win over the Baltimore Orioles on Monday.
Germán was pulled after 4⅓ innings at Yankee Stadium after giving up nine hits and two runs and striking out five. He threw 86 pitches and had a 4.52 ERA before he was replaced on the mound by Nick Ramirez.
The Orioles took full advantage of Germán. They scored in the second when Cedric Mullins hit an RBI single to right field, and they added two more runs in the third with a double from Adley Rutschman and a single from Ryan O’Hearn.
It wasn’t until a pair of solo shots in the fifth from Anthony Volpe and Kyle Higashioka that the Yankees got on the board. Then a Harrison Bader three-run shot in the eighth put them ahead and sealed the three-run win.
The Yankees have won six of their past nine games. They sit in third in the AL East, nine games back from the leading Tampa Bay Rays, with six games left before the All-Star break. Germán, 30, holds a 4.52 ERA in more than 85 innings pitched and a 5-5 record in 16 starts this season.
Germán completed the first perfect game in 11 years last week while leading the Yankees to an 11-0 win over the Oakland A’s. Germán had nine strikeouts and completed the perfect game in 99 pitches. It was the fourth such game in Yankees history and the first in MLB since Félix Hernández threw one in 2012.
That perfect game, however, comes between a pair of brutal starts for Germán. Just six days before his performance in Oakland, he was booed off the mound at Yankee Stadium after he allowed 10 runs in less than four innings against the Seattle Mariners. That was his second straight rough start, and now he has had three in four games. The perfect game seems to be an outlier on Germán’s season, and it came against arguably the worst team in baseball.