At Aberdeen, top Orioles prospects Adley Rutschman and DL Hall demonstrate a quality that's rightfully growing scarce: patience
Two of the Orioles top prospects ending their Aprils on rehab assignments was just a reminder that neither they, nor this long-term project, are where they're supposed to be.
ABERDEEN — This is just a way station on a delayed path to Camden Yards for Orioles top prospects Adley Rutschman and DL Hall, a pair of former first-round picks whose respective arm injuries required a taste of the tonic that has definitely lost its impact over the years of this rebuild: patience.
This could have been the week Rutschman debuted for the Orioles if not for his triceps injury early in spring training, while Hall is being slow-played after an elbow injury cut short his dazzling 2021 season early and likely robbed him of his major league debut late in the season.
So here they are at Ripken Stadium for a week of rehab games, shining examples of how already-arduous processes – ascending to the big leagues for a young prospect and developing enough of them for a team to boast a homegrown championship core – sometimes can’t even follow their own extended timelines.
Patience, Hall has learned through it all, can be “really tough.”
He said: “We face it. It’s kind of a thing in baseball that you kind of grow used to, just because you see it happen with so many prospects and things like that. They never rush you too much, so it’s been a long journey. But I’m looking forward to this year and actually being able to progress.”
Rutschman said he’s typically a patient person, but it’s hard to be that when it comes to baseball.
“I think the thing about an injury that’s so tough is just that you can’t do anything, especially at the start of the rehab,” Rutschman said. “You’ve really got to be shut down, and then as you progress in it and you’re able to do more, it makes it a little easier. But it’s definitely tough seeing guys you know and love go out and play every day when you’re stuck not being able to. But you’ve just got to stay in that mindset of control the controllables and what happens, happens. I think you can take solace in that, for sure.”
For this pair of young talents – Rutschman is nearly the consensus top prospect in all the game, while Hall boasts an unprecedented package of potential elite pitches that make him one of the most promising young pitchers in the sport – at least the end goal is in sight.
Mike Elias said earlier this month that once Rutschman is healthy and his timing back, he’d have “a very clear shot” to impact the Orioles. Hall said his progression to being fully built up after the lockout impacted his spring training will take him through the rest of the Orioles’ affiliates until he gets to Norfolk. Elias said in the spring that as long as he’s throwing the ball over the plate consistently, they’d feel comfortable having him in the majors quickly.
Add those two and someone like fellow former first-round pick Grayson Rodriguez and emerging starter Kyle Bradish to the mix, and the Orioles will be jump-starting the process of injecting their promising top prospects onto a major league team that has struggled by design as that group has slowly progressed through the minors.
Sunday was manager Brandon Hyde’s 400th game in charge of the Orioles, covering the entirety of Elias’ tenure leading an organization that had been almost completely torn down and needed an overhaul at pretty much every level on and off the field.
As that’s happened to great returns when it comes to amateur scouting and player development, the major league club has lost just over two-thirds of their games – Hyde’s winning percentage is .343 – and Elias and the club have sold the long-term rewards of everything happening beneath that major league surface as justification for what’s happening.
There have been incremental gains – breakouts from John Means, Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle in years past – and the aforementioned trio of Rodriguez, Hall, and Bradish will eventually be joining a pitching staff that’s far more interesting than any of its predecessors.
But every moment these top prospects are held up in Sarasota, as Rutschman and Hall were rehabbing, or now Sarasota or eventually Norfolk, is one when the Orioles are still without them. It’s a slow deterioration of the already-low levels of patience that this extra waiting causes, but there’s not exactly a deep well of understanding left at this point.
Those who believe in what’s happening are pot-committed at this point. Many others have long since abandoned the team, with decades of coming up short and now these years of 100-loss seasons compounding and causing them to fold.
Unrelated to those binary views, though, is the either-or nature of how this can end. Either Rutschman, Hall, et al are responsible for a turnaround that has already been loaded onto their shoulders and kick-start a continuous cycle of top talent coming to Camden Yards, or the arrival of all these prospects won’t do enough to change the Orioles’ fortunes.
As ever, there’s no way to know which will happen until the Orioles take the lid off their player development system and start letting these young stars out of the basket. This rehab assignment, though, shows a bit of how many layers of talent there are in said basket.
Rutschman is joining a lineup with top prospects Colton Cowser, Connor Norby, Coby Mayo, and Cesar Prieto, among others, for the week. They are the next wave, and the top performers among them could end up having Rutschman or Hall’s lockers in Norfolk by the end of the season. And they’re joining from an extended spring training camp that features a host of interesting young prospects like $1 million-catcher Creed Willems – about whom Rutschman gushed – plus rehabbing pitchers Carter Baumler and Brenan Hanifee, among others.
The group of younger players likely learned a lot from Rutschman and Hall, and they both said it went the other way, too. Hall said it reminded him of when he was that age, with “a lot of energy” all around the complex. Rutschman said they motivated him to bring that much energy to his own rehab.
That’s, at the end of the day, the hope of this grand experiment: that it ultimately feeds on itself and keeps producing the kinds of players the Orioles hope will be arriving soon with Rutschman, Hall, Rodriguez, and so many others.
Seeing them in Aberdeen when, in a perfect world, each would already be playing for the Orioles is just a reminder that somehow, for a variety of reasons both understandable and less so, the time for that to begin is not upon us.