Left-hander Luis De León struck out nine batters to match a Double-A season high Sunday, leading the Chesapeake Baysox to a 6-2 win over the Erie SeaWolves that closed out a nine-game homestand at 5-4.
De León worked six and a third innings of one-run ball, allowing four hits and a walk for his second quality start of the season as Chesapeake improved to 15-11. The performance extended a dominant recent stretch for the left-hander: over his last eight starts, De León has gone 4-1 with a 1.80 ERA — eight earned runs across 40 innings — striking out 40 batters against 14 walks. The Orioles’ No. 7 prospect according to MLB.com, De León earned Eastern League Pitcher of the Week honors earlier this month.
Chesapeake jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the second inning when Griff O’Ferrall launched his sixth home run of the season, a two-run shot to center field off SeaWolves left-hander Carlos Peña that brought home Aron Estrada. Erie answered in the third, cutting the deficit to 2-1 when Seth Stephenson reached on an error that scored Bennett Lee, the lone run charged to De León on the day.
Peña was pulled in the fifth after allowing two runs and striking out six over four and two-thirds innings, taking the loss to fall to 5-4 on the season.
The Baysox pulled away in the sixth, going ahead 4-1 after Estrada doubled and Tavian Josenberger walked ahead of a two-run double from Adam Retzbach that brought both runners home. The inning capped a strong series for Estrada, who finished 3-for-3 on the day and hit .421 — 8-for-19 — with a home run and five runs scored across the five-game set with Erie.
Richard Guasch relieved De León in the seventh and pitched an inning and two-thirds of scoreless relief with three strikeouts, marking his eighth scoreless outing in his last nine Double-A appearances and securing the win for De León, who improved to 5-6.
Chesapeake tacked on two more runs in the eighth. Josenberger blasted a solo home run to right field — his ninth of the season — to make it 5-1, and Retzbach followed with a single before scoring on a Brandon Butterworth RBI single that extended the lead to 6-1. Erie got its final run in the top of the ninth on a solo homer to center field from Patrick Lee, setting the final score at 6-2.
The win closed out a mixed nine-game homestand for Chesapeake, which went 5-4 over the stretch that included series against Erie. The Baysox now hit the road for a six-game series against the Altoona Curve, the Double-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, beginning Tuesday, July 28, at Peoples Natural Gas Field. Chesapeake returns home to Prince George’s Stadium on Tuesday, Aug. 4, at 6:35 p.m. to open a weeklong series against the Harrisburg Senators, the Double-A affiliate of the Washington Nationals.
De León’s rise has been one of the more notable storylines in the Orioles’ farm system this year. Signed out of the Dominican Republic for $30,000 during the 2021 international signing period, he broke out during a strong 2025 season that carried him to Double-A late in the year and then to the Arizona Fall League, where he was named AFL Pitcher of the Week and earned a spot among the league’s Rising Stars. That performance was enough to land him a non-roster invitation to Orioles spring training in February, an unusually early honor for a pitcher with limited Double-A experience at the time.
Sunday’s win came at the tail end of a series in which the Baysox and SeaWolves split the first three games before Chesapeake took control late, aided by a red-hot week from the middle of the lineup. Josenberger, O’Ferrall and Retzbach combined for several multi-hit and multi-RBI performances across the homestand, giving Chesapeake’s offense enough punch to back up a pitching staff that has increasingly leaned on De León and the bullpen tandem of Guasch and company down the stretch of games.
The Baysox, the Double-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, play their home games at Prince George’s Stadium in Bowie and serve as the top developmental level below Triple-A Norfolk in Baltimore’s farm system. The team rebranded from the Bowie Baysox to the Chesapeake Baysox ahead of the 2025 season to reflect a broader regional fan base across the Chesapeake Bay area.
