The Orioles and the Yankees rumble in the bottom of the ninth Friday night, after Oriole Heston Kjerstad took one on the side of his head from a Clay Holmes who clearly couldn’t control his pitch grip as the rain kept falling on Camden Yards . . . and after an incensed Oriole manager Brandon Hyde hollered at a Yankee or three to trigger the rumble. Upper right: Aaron Judge (with eye black) about to re-enter the crowd and scatter Orioles as best he could . . .

You could see the rainfall continuing in Camden Yards to the point where Yankee relief pitcher Clay Holmes had few dry spots on his road jersey. You could also imagine gripping and pitching a baseball in that bottom of the ninth moment, the Yankees up 4-1, one out, none on, and an 0-2 count on Orioles center fielder Heston Kjerstad, would be two things: difficult, and impossible.

What you didn’t have to imagine was Kjerstad on the ground in the batter’s box after Holmes’s supposed-to-have-been sinkerball took an ascending flight, instead, crashing into Kjerstad’s head through the right helmet flap, with a crack loud enough that you might have thought for one moment the ball hit Kjerstad’s bat, somehow, and enough force to knock the helmet off Kjerstad’s head as he went down.

What you didn’t want to imagine, if you still had your marble (singular) and weren’t bound to whole servitude by a particular rooting interest, was Holmes wanting to leave Kjerstad with a hole in his head when he was a strike away from putting Kjerstad away for a second out and the Yankees that much closer to sealing a win.

But too many of those bound by Oriole rooting interest decided in the jolt of the moment that Holmes, if not his fellow Yankees, was guilty of attempted murder. I can’t speak for you, but I’m not aware of that many murder attempts that end with the executioner moving and talking toward an apparently genuine concern for the victim’s well-being.

Whatever your position on the Sacred Unwritten Rules, on this much there seems general agreement: It is easier for a fastball to travel through the eye of the needle than for its pitcher to decide with premeditation that two outs short of his team’s victory requires he perform sixty-foot-distance neurosurgery upon the batter in the box

Orioles manager Brandon Hyde thought anything but, seemingly. Almost the split second Kjerstad hit the deck in agony, and Holmes himself tried to make certain he’d be all right, Hyde’s switch flipped. So did his team’s, soon enough, the Orioles pouring out of their dugout and bullpen and the Yankees pouring forth likewise from both directions.

You might understand why when you remember that Yankee pitches have hit Oriole batters up and in with alarming proliferation this season. Yankee pitches have hit a lot of players on several teams with alarming proliferation; the Yankee staff accounted for 62 hit batsmen as of Sunday morning. The Oriole staff? Tied with those of the Padres and the Rangers with 37 each to their discredit.

But Oriole pitchers had hit only three Yankees before Friday night’s blight, compared to Yankee pitchers hitting ten Orioles before that point. It’s one thing to point out that the Yankee strategy against the Orioles’ lefthanded hitters has been to work them inside, inside, and inside, but keeping it that way without resembling headhunters requires control, and lots of it.

Holmes has three hit batsmen thus far this season and has averaged seven per 162 games lifetime. This is not necessarily the resumé of a marauder. But the Orioles had reason enough to find fault that it may have escaped their thinking that the rainy inning affected Holmes’s grip enough to rob him of his control. His attempt to determine Kjerstad’s condition almost at once should have been the clarifier.

Not so fast, Hyde decided. Checking his fallen batter around the plate, Hyde first glared at Holmes; then, as Kjerstad arose from the batter’s box and began to walk around with a trainer’s aid, Hyde looked toward Holmes and hollered a rasping “[fornicate] you!” to the Yankee pitcher. The umpiring crew heard it loud enough and clear enough to converge and keep the Yankees reasonably calm and the Orioles from thinking about a rumble in the Camden jungle.

Hyde sticking up for his player was one thing, as even the Yankees acknowledged after finishing the 4-1 win. “Anybody who was out there knows it was tough to grip the baseball tonight,” said Yankee pitcher Gerrit Cole. “That said, though, the guy got hit in the head. It’s understandable that Brandon’s pissed. He’s defending his players.”

But Hyde hollering vulgarities at the Yankee pitcher who showed some genuine human concern over a serious injury he’d caused without intent was something else. As Kjerstad was escorted to the Oriole clubhouse, a  few Yankees chimed in with a variation on it was an accident, you know it was an accident, look at this rain, brain, and don’t give our guy that crap! 

At which point Hyde turned toward the Yankee dugout, and you didn’t require lip-reading training to see he was hollering back, You talkin’ to me? [Fornicate] you! Don’t [fornicating] talk to me! Then, Hyde confronted and pushed Yankee catcher Austin Wells backward some steps. Whoops.

Out poured the teams into a thick pushing and shoving mob around the innermost infield. Into the scrum walked Aaron Judge, the Leaning Tower of River Avenue, who looked to all the world as though single-handedly bumping this, that, and the other Orioles to one side as best he could.

Somewhere in the middle of the melee Hyde was ejected for the rest of the game. Somewhere else, two fan bases tried their best to urge the Yankees to pull back on the constant up-and-in pitching (down-and-in, we presume, would be less likely to incite on-field riots) and to urge the Orioles, their skipper especially, to take a breath before deciding an opponent who wounded one of theirs without intent should be tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed right then and there.

Both sides picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and started all over again Saturday, with the Yankees winning again, this time 6-1, ensuring their first series win in what began to seem eons. Not an Oriole or a Yankee got hit by a pitch, either. The temptation was to greet each inning by whispering, “they wouldn’t dare.”

But a few baseballs got rapped or detonated by Yankee bats, especially Judge setting a new team record for most bombs before an All-Star break (the previous record holder: you guessed it—Roger Maris) immediately following Juan Soto’s solo in the fifth, and Wells blasting a three-run homer in the top of the first.

The series wrapped Sunday afternoon with a 6-5 Orioles win that began with their starting pitcher Dean Kremer hitting Judge with the first pitch of the plate appearance in the first. It ended with Yankee left fielder Alex Verdugo misplaying Oriole center fielder Cedric Mullins’s liner into a game-winning two-run double, after Yankee shortstop Anthony Volpe misplayed  what should have been Oriole first baseman Ryan Mountcastle’s game-ending, Yankee win-sealing grounder, allowing the bases to stay loaded for Mullins and the Orioles back within a run.

That left the Orioles in first place in the AL East by a hair entering the All-Star break. It also ended the regular season series between the Yankees and the Orioles. The two American League East beasts don’t have to look at each other the rest of the regular season. While wishing for Kjerstad’s fully restored health, it’s also nice to see that, as of Sunday, the Judge plunk to one side and with no apparent rough stuff as a result, the two really do know how to play nice with and against each other.