August 10, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

Adley Rutschman played his first major league game on May 21 of last year.

The Baltimore Orioles, at this writing, have played .587 baseball games since then. Until last season they had not had a .500 season since 2016 and, in three full seasons that began in 2019, they lost 333 games.

It’s easy to take correlation and turn it into causation. The least you can say is that Rutschman is playing like a One-One, which he was, in the 2019 draft. He had led Oregon State to two College World Series championships and he was the proverbial no-brainer when commissioner Rob Manfred told general manager Mike Elias he was on the clock.

Now the hands on the clock are moving furiously. Baltimore was the first team in the American League to get to 70 wins and had a two-game lead in the American League East when play began on August 9. The Orioles would have been better under any circumstances, considering the many high draft picks they had. But the best players, like Rutschman, make time fly.

Rutschman, 25, has 15 home runs and 55 RBIs. He is third in the league in walks, with 66, and is seventh in on-base percentage. He is a switch-hitting catcher who has made only four errors, although defence isn’t the best thing he does. Mostly he’s the stabilizer, country strong, a leader among peers, a kid with a pure baseball heart who has a chance to become the most beloved player in Baltimore since Cal Ripken Jr., provided that the decidedly unlovable Angelos regime shells out the money, when the time comes.

Athletic catchers who remain catchers are rare birds even when they’re not Birds. Buster Posey will be an early Cooperstown selection, and Joe Mauer will get support. Posey played every position on the field during a game at Florida State, and Mauer was scholarship-material in football and basketball. Rutschman pitched for a while and was Oregon State’s kickoff man in football for a year. His most famous special teams play was a tackle of Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey, now a Pro Bowler.

Most teams don’t pretend to have a No. 1 catcher anymore, looking for platoon advantages, pairing up their catchers with the pitchers who like them the most. The Orioles are in first place because their pitching has improved dramatically. They give up four runs a game now. Four years ago they gave up six. Again, it’s difficult to judge Rutschman’s contribution, because the Orioles shrewdly moved the left-centre wall back to an inaccessible 398 feet, a 34-foot difference that has made a huge difference. With the fence raised from seven feet to 13, the Orioles give up 1.12 home runs per game overall and have given up 63 all year at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. In 2019, opponents launched 175 there.

Rutschman grew up in Sherwood, Ore., southeast of Portland, and wasn’t considered a pro prospect when he left in high school. But he had genes and support on his side. His dad Randy was a catching savant who still drills him today, and who pitched to him during the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game. His grandfather Ad coached Linfield College to three NAIA (small college) football championships, and is the only coach in American college to win national titles in baseball and football. He’s still around, still going to Linfield football games, still coaching from the seats.

The kid took off when he became a sophomore at Oregon State. He hit .408 as a sophomore and .411 as a junior, when he also had an impossible OPS of 1.326 for the Beavers. In that College World Series, he had 17 hits and 13 RBIs.

The Orioles need to finish off this season before everyone gets too projection-happy. But in coming this far, they seem to be following the Atlanta Braves’ model. They’re loading up on young position players, like Rutschman, outfielder Austin Hays, shortstop-third baseman Gunnar Henderson, upcoming shortstop and former first-overall pick Jackson Holiday, second baseman Jordan Westburg, outfielder Colton Cowser and first baseman Heston Kjerstad, who hasn’t surfaced yet.

They have come up with a massive eighth and ninth inning combo in the back of their bullpen, having swiped Yennier Cano from the Twins to go with closer Felix Bautista. They got starter Dean Kremer as part of the Manny Machado deal with the Dodgers. They picked off Tyler Myers, again from the Twins, in the Rule 5 draft. The high-profiler is Grayson Rodriguez, the 11th overall pick in the 2018 draft, and he is showing signs of arrival. It will be interesting to see if the Orioles tie up their hitters for the long term, as Atlanta did, and then figure they can patch together enough pitching without making risky long-term commitments.

There is no predicting what the Angelos family will do, as we saw this week when play-by-play man Kevin Brown was suspended for the heinous offence of reviewing the Orioles’ recent difficulties in winning games at Tampa Bay. Brown didn’t ridicule the Orioles for that. In fact, he used it to illustrate how far they’ve come. It was a stink bomb thrown into the middle of this Fourth of July cookout of the season. When fans gathered Tuesday at Oriole Park, some chanted, “Free Kevin Brown.” In the Baltimore-DC area, known as the DMV, it would almost be too much to ask to get rid of Washington Commanders’ owner Daniel Snyder and the Angelos family in the same season. Besides, Camden Yards is being updated, and the health of the franchise makes it too big to sell.

The Orioles’ surge, coupled with the Angels’ slump, brings back another bone of contention. Shohei Ohtani was the A.L. MVP in 2021 even though the Angels were no factor in the A.L. West, and he finished second to Aaron Judge last year. This year he was basically anointed on Opening Day and, of course, is on the way to compiling 40 home runs as a hitter with 200 strikeouts as a pitcher.

But if the Angels don’t get back into the periphery of wild-card contention, the same arguments will apply. How valuable can you be if your team was irrelevant to winning? No matter how Ohtani lays siege to baseball precedent, shouldn’t the award go to the player who was most consequential?

It’s moot because few writers will risk Twitter dismemberment by voting for anybody but Ohtani. That’s the main byproduct of identifying who voted for whom. It promotes consensus and crushes legitimate dissent, in the name of phony “accountability.”

And it’s not really a grand tragedy or even an injustice. Just an award. By the time Rutschman is done, the trophies will be too hard to distinguish.