[Baltimore Sun] Five things we learned from the Orioles’ week, including Gunnar Henderson’s MVP potential
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The Orioles keep winning series, even when their bullpen makes games a little too interesting or their top starters go without their top stuff. They took two of three against the surprising Kansas City Royals and did the same against the struggling Los Angeles Angels, bidding farewell to both teams for this regular season.
Here are five things we learned from a 4-2 road trip.
Gunnar Henderson is the future MVP on this roster
This was going to be a week to write about Orioles other than Henderson, but he made that impossible with his all-points masterpiece in the series finale against the Angels.
One of the pleasures of last season was the dawning recognition that Henderson has something extra. Yes, he won American League Rookie of the Year honors, but it was more than that. Every two or three games, he made a play that simply isn’t available to most major leaguers, even the really good ones.
Henderson is better in his second full season — entrenched at shortstop and in the leadoff spot, hammering almost every ball he hits and sending them over the wall at a greater clip. He’s second in FanGraphs Wins Above Replacement (WAR), sandwiched between Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani. And as with those mesmerizing talents, statistics only hint at the joys of watching him daily.
For those who’ve caught his show only intermittently, Henderson neatly consolidated all that he does spectacularly into one game against the Angels. He put the Orioles on the board in the third inning with a home run off one of the hottest left-handed starters in the game, Tyler Anderson. Two innings later, he worked the count to 2-2 and looped a double down the left-field line, racing — no Oriole tears around the bases quite like the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Henderson — to score on Adley Rutschman’s subsequent single. He came up again in the next inning, singling to center to drive in two more runs. In the top of the eighth, he was hit by a pitch and stole second. And in the bottom of the inning, he made the play of the game, backhanding a grounder that squirted past third baseman Jordan Westburg and throwing from the outfield grass to get Taylor Ward by a step.
A ballplayer can’t do much more than that to help his team win, and it was all so entertaining.
Rutschman will always be the original seed of this Orioles era, a stabilizing force whose value cannot entirely be quantified. Jackson Holliday is the top prospect of the moment, the one who took less than two years out of high school to ace the minor leagues.
But it’s Henderson who does the most things to make us say wow, who seems most likely to be the best player in the American League at some point. He’s 22 years old. We don’t know exactly what he’ll be at 27, what obstacles might arise. But there aren’t many players who even make us think they might go down in franchise lore with names like Robinson, Palmer, Murray and Ripken. Henderson could.
Orioles right-hander Dean Kremer has two excellent starts and two solid ones through five outings this season. (Ashley Landis/AP)
The Orioles could do a lot worse than Dean Kremer for a No. 4 or No. 5 starter
We tend to talk past Kremer when envisioning the Orioles’ optimal rotation. Perhaps it’s his propensity to surrender home runs or the shelling he took from the Texas Rangers in the playoffs last October. An honest look at Kremer’s past three seasons, however, reveals a pitcher who’s been effective more often than not. His 4.61 ERA this season is nothing beautiful, but he’s started five times, and in only one of those did he give the Orioles no chance to win.
We saw the best of him Wednesday as he struck out 10, walked one and made just a single bad mistake to Mike Trout in a 6-5 win over the Angels. Kremer induced hitters to chase his fastball up in the strike zone, pumping it to 94.6 mph when he needed extra juice against Trout. His cutter consistently darted away from right-handed hitters. We don’t think of him as overpowering, but he can be when he has those two pitches working in tandem.
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“I think everything goes hand-in-hand,” he said. “I don’t know that I have any outlier stuff, but if I can be good with three of the four pitches or four of the five, it’s hard for them to sit on any one thing.”
Kremer was the Orioles’ most effective starter in 2022. He knocked a run off his ERA over the second half of last year to finish at a respectable 4.12 over a career-high 172 2/3 innings. He has two excellent starts and two solid ones through five outings this season.
No team rolls out five aces. Kremer’s resume says he’s a valuable pitcher, and it’s time we stop taking him for granted.
The overabundance of starters is a necessity, not a problem
With John Means and Kyle Bradish almost ready to return and Tyler Wells expected to resume throwing shortly, manager Brandon Hyde could soon be staring at eight pitchers with solid cases to start games.
Corbin Burnes and Grayson Rodriguez are givens, and Bradish would be if he approaches his form from the end of last season. We just covered Kremer. Cole Irvin pitched his best game of the season Sunday to beat the Royals. And there’s the miraculous Albert Suárez, who has done nothing but throw strikes and prevent runs in his first major league action since 2017.
Orioles face tough decisions with John Means, Kyle Bradish nearing returns
Assuming good health for all, three of Means, Irvin, Kremer, Suárez and Wells are headed for the bullpen or rotation spots in Triple-A Norfolk.
And you know, that’s how it has to be on a good club, because the only certainty about pitcher health is uncertainty. Elbows will swell. Arm fatigue will set in. Hyde will likely have to call on all these guys at some point over the next five months.
And let’s not overlook the good a few of these pitchers could do for a bullpen that’s called to cover at least three innings on most nights. Wells was terrific as a power reliever last September, and there’s a good chance that’s where he’ll help the Orioles most this season. Suárez pounds the strike zone with power fastballs, and that might make him the perfect candidate to fill the team’s long-relief hole.
This puzzle won’t stop shifting, so the Orioles are better off playing with extra pieces.
Orioles second baseman Jackson Holliday no longer looks like he’s straining to impress every time he walks to the plate. (Ronald Martinez/Getty)
We’re starting to see positive glimmers from Jackson Holliday
It was grimly predictable. The same voices that had accused the Orioles of squandering games by keeping Holliday in Triple-A called for him to be demoted right back when he was overmatched in his first 10 days as a 20-year-old major leaguer. He went from messiah to “automatic out” in less than two weeks.
Never mind that the Orioles were winning and that their previous two No. 1 overall prospects, Rutschman and Henderson, had also lived through bumpy introductions to the highest level of the sport.
Internally, Hyde just wanted Holliday to take the kind of quality at-bats he was known for as he raced through five minor league levels in less than two years. He didn’t care where the kid’s start ranked in the history of cold openings. It was the over-eager approach — 0-2 counts followed by desperate hacks at unhittable pitches — that troubled him.
Well, we started to see a different Holliday over the past few games.
In the Orioles’ series-closing win over the Royals, he made hard contact on a 2-2 curveball and took a five-pitch walk. Even on a strikeout in the sixth inning, he worked the count to 3-2 before looking at a sinker on the edge of the zone.
After a rest day, he lashed the hardest ball of his career, 104.4 mph, off a first-pitch curve as the Orioles tried to muster a rally in their 7-4 loss to the Angels. It was a confident swing, albeit sandwiched between lesser at-bats in which he fell behind.
Again, we’re attempting to draw conclusions from tiny samples of a career that’s likely to last a long time. But some of the markers Hyde mentioned have begun to turn Holliday’s way. He no longer looks like he’s straining to impress every time he walks to the plate.
Holliday’s past development tells us he will figure this out, probably sooner rather than later.
Orioles right-hander Grayson Rodriguez’s loss to the Angels, bad enough to ugly up his line for this young season, was a reminder that he’s still a work in progress. (Ryan Sun/AP)
Grayson Rodriguez’s worst start of the season was a reminder that he’s still learning to avoid disaster
The Angels clubbed 11 hits, including six for extra bases, off the 24-year-old right-hander, who had pitched well enough for the Orioles to win each of his first four outings.
Rodriguez’s arm looked fine. He hit 98 mph with his fastball and struck out seven in 4 1/3 innings. He just missed his spots, first with a fastball over the heart of the plate to Trout, who has made a Hall of Fame career blasting such pitches over the fence. From there, Trout’s teammates smacked Rodriguez’s breaking stuff all over Angel Stadium. He did not seem to have a good feel for either his curve or his slider.
There’s stuff, there’s control and there’s command. Rodriguez missed bats. He walked just one hitter. But he could not make the ball do what he wanted within the strike zone. The third leg of his stool was missing on this night.
“I just didn’t think he executed,” Hyde said. “A lot of balls that were kind of middle of the plate, thigh-high, wrong parts of the plate to the game plan, and they made him pay for it. Maybe just an off night for him.”
No starter goes to the mound with optimal feel every time. The best avoid disaster on those “off” days. Burnes has done it several times already this year.
We saw Rodriguez make terrific strides in this respect after a disastrous May sent him back to the minors last season. His loss to the Angels, bad enough to ugly up his line for this young season, was a reminder that he’s still a work in progress.
“I just caught too much of the plate tonight,” he said. “I threw the ball down the middle with a lot of mistakes, and those guys were ready for it.”
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