A year on from their epic losing streak, the Orioles have proven they're different. The Gunnar Henderson situation will show whether that extends beyond the field.
Calling up baseball's top prospect ahead of schedule would show that the Orioles' front office has changed along with the product on the field, of which Tuesday was another fine example.
A year ago today, the Orioles lost 14-8 to the Los Angeles Angels to extend their ignominious losing streak to 19 games.
“That obviously wasn’t fun,” Ryan Mountcastle told me before the game, “but we’ve definitely turned a corner, that’s for sure.”
Considering the day’s main frustration a year on is that the Orioles for the second time this season have baseball’s top overall prospect – Gunnar Henderson–and didn’t promote him to join a big league lineup that still managed to beat Cy Young contender Dylan Cease, times have certainly changed.
No one can deny that. But we are in the midst of finding out, through this month’s trades and the latest prospect promotion saga when it comes to Henderson, whether the on-field changes are being met with organizational ones. There’s certainly a distinction.
The clamor for Henderson to join Adley Rutschman and the rest of the Orioles’ recently-promoted prospects in a lineup that’s already producing its best month of the season would probably be happening regardless of whether the Orioles were six games above .500 or 38 games below like they were a year ago.
That it’s coming from a very reasonable place from an outside perspective – that this team is close enough to a playoff spot for Henderson to make a difference – only goes to validate not only that desire to see him in Baltimore but the turnaround that begs for his presence.
In fairness, this is what the Orioles have prepared people for. From essentially the 2019 draft on, the idea that Rutschman and Henderson and the Orioles’ prospect core were more important than any of the losing that happened on MASN was one the team pushed and that fans who stuck with them through their decline and trough embraced.
What choice did anyone have? To say the losing streak that ended a year ago tomorrow was the low point is to discount the fact that it was basically three-plus years of them, only that was the most embarrassing.
Someone in the organization made a good point last summer that a losing streak of that magnitude is the kind of thing your grandmother who doesn’t follow baseball will hear about. The positive version of that is the kind of season the Orioles are having right now, one that has served to both draw the neutrals back to some extent but also reward those who stayed for their patience.
Just because it’s ahead of schedule doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and the last three-plus years of expectation management seemed to bake in the idea that the Orioles being good and these top prospects in their system being in the big leagues would be a package deal. Instead, they’re just shopping at a better discard rack than usual and have found way better pitching falling off other teams’ rosters, and they’ve hit enough to win on more nights than not.
There’s no denying Henderson has the talent to improve the team, even if this is the Orioles’ best offensive month of the season. They entered Tuesday with a .770 OPS this month, scoring five runs per game. Their infielders not named Jorge Mateo, however, have a combined .601 OPS and a wRC+ of 73 since the All-Star break – well below league average.
The need to upgrade only really exists if the Orioles have ambitions to actually try and make the playoffs, and just because the front office said as much earlier this month doesn’t mean they’ll do anything to impact the long-term sustainability this project has been built around. One of the tenets of that so far has been to not do anything they don’t have to do.
Adding Kyle Stowers to the roster a month-plus early relative to his Rule 5 protection time kind of bucks that, but adding Henderson a full year before they’d have to has the kind of long-term implications of free agency and arbitration the club has painstakingly avoided for years. We have already seen the front office put on blinders and trade away Trey Mancini and Jorge Lopez in the name of the future. It’s hard to imagine them ceding anything meaningful in their long-term planning, but that’s the position they’re in through a combination of Henderson’s supreme gifts and drives and the systems put in place to challenge him in his development.
Mountcastle knows a thing or two about what Henderson is going through now. He was the International League MVP in 2019 but wasn’t on the 40-man roster and thus wasn’t a consideration for a September call-up. Henderson is in a different position, as at least the Orioles are entertaining the idea of calling him up whereas Mountcastle being added was never really a consideration, but the feeling is the same.
“It’s a little frustrating as a player because you obviously want to be in the big leagues,” Mountcastle said. “Gunnar is an incredible player, and I’m sure he wants to be up here too. But it’s all for a reason.”
The reasons can vary, the validity of each varying based on one’s perspective. Saying he needs to cut down on his strikeouts or hit more against lefties is pretty standard fare when it comes to amorphous development goals used to keep a player down in the minors, particularly when there’s an incentive for the club to do so.
(Tuesday being the day when players wouldn’t accrue enough service time in 2022 to make a player rookie-eligible in 2023 and thus qualify his team for a bonus draft pick if the player is on the Opening Day roster and finishes in the top-three of the Rookie of the Year voting certainly qualifies as an incentive, especially when the Orioles won’t be picking as high as they have in years past.)
To need him to get more experience at second base or first base, the positions he’s played exclusively for the last week, speaks to something different. They seem like bonus quests tacked onto his development, sure, but if the plan was to have him come up this season, there’s absolutely no way the Orioles will have left that to this late stage of the season to begin that process.
They prepare for every eventuality, but it seems strange that this wouldn’t have been one of them. Putting Henderson through all these additional tests only to not bring him to Baltimore seems like it runs counter to most of what they believe in.
Maybe it points to a change in plans. They know what they have in Henderson, and my impression is they believe he can be a special player. But until they prove otherwise, be it with payroll or promotions, the organization as a whole gets held to the same standard as the club on the field: once the differences are as noticeable as last night was from this time last year, it will be considered real.
This absolutely seems like a change in plans that will get Henderson to Baltimore sooner. The ‘plan’ was probably to give him a full rest of season at Norfolk, and then maybe (or maybe not) have him on the Opening Day roster in 2023. Now, it looks to me like they want him to come to Baltimore and play second base, potentially because Mateo has been so good of late. But since he’s never really played second base, it seems prudent to have him do some of that learning in Norfolk rather than the thick of a postseason push.