Ryan Johnson Dominates, Schanuel's Blast Sinks Baltimore 5-1
Ryan Johnson threw six innings of near-perfect baseball — 1 hit, 0 earned runs, 8 strikeouts — and Los Angeles handed Baltimore a 5-1 defeat on June 24. The story of the night was how completely and early the Angels seized control, never once letting the Orioles breathe.
It took exactly one at-bat for Los Angeles to announce its intentions. In the first inning, Nolan Schanuel drove a 382-foot home run to right center, scoring Zach Neto and swinging the home win probability from 47% to 64% — a 17-point lurch that effectively set the tone for everything that followed. Schanuel finished 2-for-4 with 2 RBI and a run scored. Neto, who crossed the plate on that blast, went 2-for-4 with 2 runs on the night. Baltimore's offense, meanwhile, had nothing to say about any of it through the first six innings.
The Angels weren't done piling on. In the fifth, Vaughn Grissom singled to left, scoring two runners — Siri and Neto — to push the lead to 4-0. Jorge Soler then added a sacrifice fly to center, scoring Grissom and making it 5-0. Grissom finished 1-for-4 with 2 RBI and a run scored; Soler went 0-for-2 but delivered when it counted. Baltimore finally got on the board in the seventh when Leody Taveras singled to center, scoring Gunnar Henderson and moving Basallo to second — but that was all the Orioles could muster. Henderson went 1-for-4 with a run scored; Taveras finished 1-for-3 with an RBI. One run against a five-run deficit is a footnote, not a comeback.
On the pitching side, Ryan Johnson's line deserves to be read twice: 6.0 innings, 1 hit, 0 earned runs, 1 walk, 8 strikeouts. That is a performance that appears to put Johnson squarely in the conversation as one of the better starters in the American League right now — though with the 2026 midseason awards discussion already heating up around the league, it remains to be seen how much national attention a performance like this earns. Baltimore's Shane Baz absorbed the damage, lasting just 5.0 innings and surrendering all 5 earned runs on 8 hits. Albert Suarez opened cleanly for Baltimore with 3 scoreless innings, but Baz couldn't hold the line once the Angels' lineup got rolling. Ryan Zeferjahn closed it out for Los Angeles with a perfect inning — 3 strikeouts, no hits, no walks. Final: LAA 5, BAL 1.