From the Delmon Double to the Oriole Way: How the Orioles teach fundamentals to a new generation of prospects
Orioles coordinator of instruction Jeff Kunkel oversees a fundamentals program that uses video review to foster anticipation of game situations and sharpen the baseball acumen of the team's prospects.
Not even a decade on from Delmon Young’s three-run double in the 2014 playoffs against the Detroit Tigers, and hardly anyone involved in that seminal moment in modern Orioles history is still around. One man on the other side, however, uses it as an example to the team’s prospects of how if they focus on getting every detail of the game correctly, Baltimore can explode that way again soon.
Jeff Kunkel, the Orioles’ coordinator of instruction, oversees the fundamentals program meant to teach a generation of showcase baseball players the intricacies of the game in a manner that best meshes with how they learn. But back in 2014, he was the Tigers’ bullpen catcher, with a field-wide view of a play he begrudgingly says he embraced.
“They beat us, flat-out, just because of doing the little things,” Kunkel told me. “All these little things keep adding up, and it turns out where you sweep [Max] Scherzer, [Justin] Verlander, and [David] Price in three games. It’s not an easy thing to do, but that team, that’s how they were built. They just played the game the right way.”
Every day, every Orioles minor leaguer spends between 15 and 20 minutes focusing on just that, with video breakdowns and team meetings with each minor league affiliate’s fundamentals coach stressing those little things. When Kunkel held that role at Bowie last summer, he admits he showed that seminal play more than once, noting things like how J.D. Martinez tracked the ball in the corner, which cut-off man he ultimately hit, and how precise J.J. Hardy’s baserunning was. The series turned on those kinds of moments, he said.
“I’d be lying if I said that’s not a play that I showed multiple times last year in Bowie,” Kunkel said. “I showed it in spring training, and it’s more of a pride aspect of like, ‘We could do this.’ This sea of orange shirts, the crowd that’s in the streets in the morning outside the Inner Harbor. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, and on the other side of it, how intimidating it was.”
The present, with the Orioles enduring multiple 100-loss seasons at the major league level, is far from that. But Kunkel is part of a wave of recent hires on the farm meant to change that, with no aspect of the game ignored. That includes the basics — from baserunning to cutoff positioning and relays — with a dedicated coach at each level ensuring everything is taught in a similar manner that matches what the major league staff demands in Baltimore.
Kunkel was a former Tigers farmhand who after being a bullpen catcher moved to a scouting role within that organization before joining the Orioles for the 2020 season. He said defense and baserunning were facets of the game he “had to take a lot of pride in as a player, something that I had to be really good at,” and he’s trying to instill that in a new generation.
“We’re trying to prepare as many players as we can for the next step, whether that’s moving to A-ball to Double-A, obviously the game changes at each level,” Kunkel said. “We want them to do the work, to be prepared, so when situations come up in games they know where to go and what to do, whether that’s offensively or defensively, and just play the game the right way.”
Traditionally, these types of things are drilled in practices or before games; some minor league teams still do a formal infield/outfield practice after they hit on gamedays. Orioles minor leaguers still do individual defensive skill work on the field, but understanding that the greatest challenge of their position players will be hitting at a major league level and maintaining their body over the course of a long season, the Orioles are trying to teach those team-based defensive foundations in a classroom setting so as not to take too much time away from those priorities.
Kunkel, who was the fundamentals coach on a talented Bowie staff last year, said the game review sessions they arrived at there produced results.
“We talked things through, and our coaches are teachers,” Kunkel said. “They’re trying to create a learning environment at each place that allows our players to succeed. The guys are very visual learners these days. The video gives them a chance to go over the play as it happened, to explain to the rest of the group what happened, and we can teach that player and the rest of the team, all at the same time.”
At different levels, that means different things. Daniel Fajardo, a former Orioles minor league catcher, is the development coach for Delmarva, whose position players were mostly products of the international program at the start of the year. He had to do some quick work after Shorebirds defenders were “all over the place” on some early cuts and relays, but they brought them into the ensuing video meetings and cleaned it up.
“For a lot of guys, watching is a good way to teach and that’s why we always have the meeting and bring the TV and show them, this is the play that happened last night, this is where you were, this is where you were supposed to be so next time that happens, prepare,” Fajardo said. “Also, anticipation is one of my favorite words that I like to use in meetings with them. They know before the play happens where they need to be in case of a double, where they need to be in case of a bunt, where am I going to go if there’s a base-hit to right field.”
A level up at Aberdeen, first-year coach Isaiah Paige has the benefit of having just pitched at Michigan, where Kunkel used to play, and where the way these basics of the game were presented in a similar way. Like Kunkel, he now describes how things are done with a familiar phrase: the Oriole Way.
“One thing that we talk about a lot here is having a certain language on how we do things, so there are a lot of intricacies in baseball, different ways that things can be done that can get muddled in translation as they make their way to the big leagues,” Paige said. “Different players doing different things, which kind of creates a little bit of chaos. I see my role, fundamentally, as a fundamentals coach who instructs the guys to do things the Oriole Way.”
A peer of many of the Ironbirds players in terms of his age, Paige understands what resonates with his generation. He is happy to clip up the plays that need working on, but also revels in the moments when a player comes into the dugout and insists that what he just did on the field was so good it deserved highlighting the next day. He’s also found some interesting fodder from other MLB games, with players mic’ed up on nationally-broadcast games and sharing their thought process ahead of key moments.
Paige said: “It’s thinking ahead of situations before they actually happen. Baseball, there’s not action every single pitch. The pitch clock can do as much as it can, but it’s about the guys really being attentive for every single play, thinking about what could happen. So, I think the video review kind of does that in a really good way because it highlights things that maybe aren’t as common or maybe things that are super common that we need to keep on the front of our minds. I think that’s really a solidified skill that can be done here, is really, really sharpening that overall baseball knowledge.”
Kunkel says it’s no secret that teams are doing everything they can to improve their players, and that the Orioles use data and technology in so many facets to that end. But there’s hardly anything new-school about teaching the game and its intricacies in a top-down consistent manner.
“We have the Oriole Way that has been around for decades, and it’s kind of a return to that in a sense,” Kunkel said. “We have these new tools, and the modern game you speak of, we are all-in, and trying to maximize the players that we have. But at the same time, the game has not changed that much that these things are no longer important. They’re just as much — or more — important now as they were 50 years ago.”
Well played to put the "maximize" quote in the final paragraph.