Adley Rutschman is now a step away from his Orioles debut. Will he save the offense, or is it saving itself in his image?
The league-wide decline in offense only goes so far to explain why the Orioles are so badly underperforming their underlying data through 25 games. Adley Rutschman might, though.
I wasn’t trying to be cute. It just felt like a fair way to ask the question everyone wants the answer to.
Given Mike Elias said Adley Rutschman would be in the mix for his major league debut as soon as he was back to himself, I asked Tuesday afternoon in Bowie just how close he felt to himself and whether there was progress on that in his week at Aberdeen. Didn’t work.
“I’m just trying to stay focused, stay on the path, and continue to just try and feel healthy,” Rutschman said. “Results come as they may, so just focusing on being here with this team right now.”
As was the case when he arrived in Aberdeen, and even now as he’s a step closer to the majors having been promoted alongside DL Hall to Norfolk for Friday’s game, every day that Rutschman is on his rehab tour of the Orioles’ farm system is a week that he’s not at Camden Yards playing for the Orioles. That’s notable for two reasons.
First of all, the No. 2 overall pick selected behind Rutschman in 2019, Bobby Witt Jr., started the year in the big leagues and is in town with the Kansas City Royals this weekend. Top catching prospect MJ Melendez joined him this week.
On another level, it’s a shame for just how badly the Orioles could use someone like him. The Orioles’ offensive struggles are really undercutting what in many ways should be a more interesting team than it is, and it’s entirely possible Wednesday and Thursday’s offensive outbursts were an anomaly.
The fuller picture of the season paints a different story, and undoubtedly, extending their lineup and having baseball’s top prospect at the heart of it will help things out. If the Orioles’ offense improves in the coming weeks, though, it won’t be just because of Rutschman. It will be because they simply keep doing what they’re doing.
Let’s get a couple things out of the way quickly: this is not saying the Orioles are good enough as constructed. Year Four of the waiver claim infielder plan is going about the same as the first three, and the production at catcher has been such that it actually lends credence to the idea that Rutschman was supposed to break camp with the major league team.
In an offensive environment that has been hell on hitters for the first month of the season, the Orioles have suffered to a particularly high degree. There have been many good articles written about how the new baseball isn’t flying the way its predecessors did, and MLB storing baseballs in humidors at most parks is limiting ball flight as well. Seems like it’s all making a big difference.
Through Wednesday’s games, based on past batted ball data, the league-wide expected batting average is 19 points higher than the actual one (.252 against .233), and the expected slugging percentage is 62 points higher than the actual one as well (.434 versus .372). By weighted on-base average (wOBA), which uses the expected run value of each type of batted ball plus walks to create something akin to an on-base percentage, xwOBA league-wide is .328 – 23 points higher than the actual one of .305.
The Orioles are laggards on many of these fronts. Only two teams have a worse difference between their wOBA and xwOBA than the Orioles’ -41, while they’re in the lower third of the league with a difference of 32 points between their actual batting average (.221) and expected one (.253) and 92 points between their team slugging percentage of .322 and expected slugging percentage of .414.
Some of the players contributing to this most are ones you’d expect, though not all. Ramón Urías probably falls in the latter category; based on quality of contact, his xwOBA is .361, though his actual is a paltry .242. Trey Mancini has a 90-point gulf between his xwOBA (.295) and actual one (.385). Ryan Mountcaslte comes next with a 66-point difference, and Jorge Mateo is at 60. (Mateo did plenty to change that Thursday.)
It’s worth noting that in the case of the team as a whole, the Orioles would at-best be middle-of-the-pack offensively if the expected outcomes actually happened. Many other teams would improve as well – in all likelihood including whichever team the Orioles face on a given night.
So their pitching improvement may not be permanent either, but a team with a decent offense and a better-than-decent pitching staff can win a lot of games, and the Orioles will probably be better than decent when some of their weaker links on the staff are replaced by Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall before long.
What does this have to do with Rutschman? Well, at this point in the Orioles’ project, what doesn’t?
When I saw what Hyde said about the team’s offensive struggles, though, I had to think about what I thought it meant. There was a part of me that wondered whether it was a rebuke of what the Orioles were trying to do in their hitting program under Ryan Fuller or Matt Borgschulte, which at a very basic level is try to hit the ball as hard as they can as often as possible.
I settled on that not being the case, though, and instead a public reminder that they should be sticking to what’s being taught and the results they’re seeking will come. The emphasis on swing decisions and attacking balls over the heart of the plate is essentially in-line with the rest of their production in that based on the batted balls in those situations, the Orioles should be much more productive. It stands to reason that even with flat baseballs, that will improve.
And in all of these areas that this hitting program is meant to emphasize, adding Rutschman will only enhance that. His whole offensive game is built on controlling the strike zone and attacking his pitch. The Orioles’ minor league hitting program was essentially workshopped at the alternate site in 2020, and the coaches there noted how important it was to have someone of Rutschman’s stature at that year’s fall instructional camp to show how it worked when someone bought in. When he plays in the minors, managers and coaches can see how he works an at-bat rubbing off on his teammates.
Perhaps the Orioles sticking with this plan will pay dividends before Rutschman gets up – seven home runs in two games after seven in their previous 16 indicates they may be. Maybe it’ll be, as so many other things have been with these Orioles, a one step forward two steps back situation.
It just seems like even if the baseball is driving some of their struggles so far, there’s still plenty of room for their performance to level out with that factored in. They’re just getting dangerously close to the part where the turnaround will be attributable to Rutschman’s arrival when, even if that will certainly help, it will be because they’ve kept working at the hitting philosophy the Orioles are essentially modeling after what makes him special.