The Orioles took two of three from the Tampa Bay Rays at Camden Yards, then flew to Toronto to split four games with the Blue Jays. They have now won or split 20 straight series against American League East opponents.
Here are five things we learned from another winning week against perhaps the best division in baseball.
A debuting Cade Povich did not have the stuff to overcome a lapse in command
Povich, the Orioles’ top pitching prospect, threw his four-seam fastball early and accurately to get through his first two major league innings unscathed on Thursday.
A pair of five-pitch walks — the products of nibbling changeups and cutters — set him up for doom in the third inning. “You don’t need to be so fine,” Mid-Atlantic Sports Network analyst and former Orioles reliever Brad Brach said when asked what he’d advise the 24-year-old at that moment.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not the man a rookie pitcher wants to see striding to the plate when he’s trying to extricate himself from a sticky spot. The right-handed Guerrero hasn’t traditionally destroyed lefties such as Povich, but he hits mistakes about as hard as anyone in the sport.
Sure enough, Povich left an 86.8 mph cutter up and on the outside corner. Guerrero drove it over the right-field fence to put the rookie down 3-0.
Scouts who’ve watched Povich over the years say he needs to command his offspeed stuff to thrive. Though his strikeout rate at Triple-A Norfolk was very good, he doesn’t have the velocity or singular finishing pitch to blast his way out of trouble against the best hitters in the world.
He was both too fine and not fine enough with the cutter and changeup in that fateful sequence against the Blue Jays.
Despite Povich’s rough statistical line, manager Brandon Hyde said he would not hesitate to start the rookie again (he pitched Thursday because the Orioles wanted to get Kyle Bradish rest coming off his worst outing of the season).
“He threw the ball a lot better than what his final line says he did,” catcher James McCann said, alluding to several softly hit balls that plopped between Baltimore defenders and a pair of runners who scored after the rookie departed in the sixth inning.
If not for the mistake to Guerrero compounded by the earlier walks, Povich would have put his team in position to win. That’s life in the big leagues. So ended his first lesson.
We saw a different offense after the Orioles were swept in St. Louis
They reached at a .206 clip (with a 6.8% walk rate) over those three losses to the Cardinals, falling to 26th in the league in on-base percentage through 47 games.
Over the next 12 games, of which they won 10, the Orioles’ on-base percentage leaped to .341 (with a 7.9% walk rate), which would easily lead the league. They averaged 6.25 runs per game, a number that would also easily lead the league.
Are we simply looking at a small sample during which several hitters — hello Austin Hays, Ryan Mountcastle and Anthony Santander — heated up in unison? Or did something fundamentally change?
Well, their walk rate did climb from 6.9% over the first 47 games to 7.9% — close to league average instead of near the bottom — over the next dozen. In turn, they rose from 26th to 18th in on-base percentage.
The power was there all along. The Orioles lead the league in slugging percentage and have for much of the season. Add even a few runners per game to that recipe, and you supercharge an offense that already ranked fifth in runs per game coming off that ugly series in St. Louis.
We can see the change more specifically in the team’s best hitter, Gunnar Henderson, whose violent bat discards after he takes ball four are drawing almost as much acclaim as his colossal home runs.
Henderson was a powerful but nontraditional leadoff hitter through most of the first two months. But he’s now on pace to draw 91 walks for the season, with almost half his season total coming over the past two weeks. If pitchers are going to work him carefully because of his power, he has embraced beating them with discernment.
For example, in the Orioles’ 10-1 win over the Blue Jays on Tuesday, he scorched a double for his lone hit in five plate appearances. But Henderson scored three runs because he also walked twice. That’s classic table setting. Don’t look now, but he ranked 10th in the AL in on-base percentage going into Thursday.
He’s leading a patience movement that could take the club’s offense to another level if it’s more widely embraced.
Ryan Mountcastle has as much claim to being a forefather of this run as anyone
Santander, Hays and Cedric Mullins debuted earlier. We talk about the 2019 selection of Adley Rutschman as the dawn of a better age.
Mountcastle, however, is a bridge between eras. Dan Duquette was still running baseball operations and the Orioles were coming off an AL Championship Series appearance when they drafted him in 2015 as a high school shortstop out of Florida. Hundreds of losses and a regime change later, he took his first major league swings for the 2020 pandemic Orioles that also featured Mullins, Santander and Hays giving us hints of the success to come.
He was not a prodigy. He needed five minor league seasons and a series of position shifts to find his optimal place in Baltimore.
But the 2024 Orioles don’t make sense without Mountcastle.
On a team packed with left-handed power, he’s the right-hander who can blast a ball 443 feet — the longest home run of the season for a team that specializes in the long ball — to the centerfield stands as he did Tuesday in Toronto.
Henderson and Jordan Westburg launch odd-angled throws from the left side of the infield, knowing Mountcastle will pick them off the ground with a deft flick of his mitt. He works on mastering his underestimated position before every game, and the payoff is evident. He already has as many defensive runs saved (a Fielding Bible measure of all-around performance with the glove) as he did the previous two seasons combined.
Mountcastle isn’t quite an All-Star. He has two arbitration years left after this season. You could argue he’ll soon block Coby Mayo, who’s five years younger with perhaps more power potential and no obvious place to play other than first base.
That said, the Orioles are scoring gobs of runs and winning more than 60% of the time, and not coincidentally, their best periods coincide with Mountcastle clobbering the ball to all fields. He’s bound up in the DNA of this team as much as Hyde or Rutschman or Henderson. We shouldn’t overlook his part when we tell the tale.
The Orioles’ farm depth is coming to bear
Just last week, we talked about Jorge Mateo patching a hole in the Orioles’ infield plans, and then he got bonked on the head by Mullins’ bat in the strangest of baseball accidents.
That mishap might have put a strain on many teams’ depth charts. For the Orioles, it created an opportunity to look at Connor Norby, who had done more than enough at Triple-A Norfolk — .286/.374/.510 with nine home runs and seven stolen bases in 51 games — to show he was worthy of big league at-bats.
They didn’t even have to turn back to their top prospect, Jackson Holliday, who’s working on a longer project fine-tuning his swing after he hit .059 in his first taste of the majors. They had another infielder who would already be starting for some major league clubs.
We often talk about the Orioles’ prospect glut in terms of the trade possibilities it might set up or the opportunities that aren’t there for individual players. We forget how frequently injuries impact a contender’s fortunes and how valuable it is to have insurance policies at almost every position. The No. 1 farm system Mike Elias and his staff built is not just a cool abstraction; it’s a spare oxygen tank for the 2024 team as it tries to reach the World Series.
Norby stared at a few fastballs he would usually attack in his Monday debut but announced himself loudly when he drilled a chunky slider into the Toronto bullpen on Tuesday night.
“The coolest thing I’ve done playing baseball,” the 2021 second-round draft pick out of East Carolina said of his home run and first career hit.
There’s no way to know how many more cool moments Norby will have with the Orioles. Mateo will come off the 7-day concussion list. Holliday will likely become the club’s long-term second baseman, possibly as soon as this summer. Perhaps Norby, who can also play outfield, will become a super-utility player in Baltimore. Perhaps he’ll be shipped out to start for another team as Joey Ortiz was in the Corbin Burnes trade.
For now, it’s awfully reassuring for the Orioles to know they can dial up another very good prospect whenever the next roster problem arises. It was exactly this kind of organizational depth that carried them through their golden age from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
How can we feel anything but gutted for John Means?
The fact that it’s a familiar story doesn’t make it any less awful to watch.
When the Orioles announced Monday that Means had undergone his second Tommy John elbow reconstruction, it was impossible not to think of the big-picture implications for his career. Many pitchers have come back successfully from one elbow reconstruction. It’s significantly more difficult to find those who have bounced back from two in such a condensed period (Means’ previous Tommy John procedure was in 2022).
Add to that the cold reality that at age 31, Means is headed for free agency after this season with no guarantee he’ll be able to pitch again before 2026. At that point, he’d be trying to revive his career after pitching just 52 1/3 major league innings over four seasons.
If he could have pitched effectively through the end of this year, which felt like a real possibility after he joined the rotation with a sharp start on May 4, he might have improved his long-term financial outlook by millions of dollars.
Losing Means and Tyler Wells to season-ending surgeries was bad news for the Orioles. They’ll need as many rotation and bullpen options as possible to endure the attrition of the next five months.
But it’s the players who invite empathy, none more so than Means, an admired citizen of the Orioles’ clubhouse who gave fans hope in the years when there wasn’t much to come by. Elbow injuries snuff out promising pitching careers every week. It’s a rotten subplot that seems to loom larger every year.
