Five things we learned from the Orioles’ week, including Kyle Bradish’s promising return and the joys of booing Juan Soto
The Orioles bounced back from a pair of one-run losses to the Oakland Athletics to take three of four from the New York Yankees.
Here are five things we learned from a 4-3 homestand that put them in first place in the AL East.
Kyle Bradish’s return went as well as the Orioles could have hoped
Bradish began his first start of the season with a 96 mph sinker for a strike, a sterling omen if you believe in that sort of thing.
The Orioles’ 2023 ace had spent the previous few months rehabilitating a strained ulnar collateral ligament, which he chose to treat with a platelet-rich plasma injection. The Orioles, well aware of how essential Bradish could be to their championship ambitions, greeted his return with a combination of giddy anticipation and tugging anxiety.
“I think you just feel nervous almost every time some guys take the mound right now,” manager Brandon Hyde said before Thursday’s game. “But we feel great about the progress that Kyle has made and how he’s feeling and all the boxes he’s checked and how the rehab went. I know he’s excited to be out there today, and it’s going to be fun watching him pitch.”
Bradish was unlucky in the first inning, which he appeared to get out of 1-2-3 only for Yankees slugger Aaron Judge to be sent to first base on catcher interference. Bradish hit the next batter and walked the one after that, ultimately throwing 23 pitches to finish an inning that could’ve ended in nine.
The stuff — sinker between 95 and 97 mph and slider sitting around 88 mph — looked about as good as it did last season.
“It’s like he hasn’t lost a beat,” Hyde said, noting the movement on Bradish’s fastball. “He just threw outstanding.”
To his credit, Bradish did not allow the messiness of the first inning to knock him off course. He fell behind a few more times than he might have liked, and Hyde understandably went to get him after he walked Judge on four errant sliders with two outs in the top of the fifth.
A relieved Bradish said he’ll focus on wasting fewer pitches, throwing his slider for strikes early in the count and waiting for strikeout opportunities to bend it out of the zone. He’ll also build strength; the Orioles weren’t going to give him more than the 84 pitches he threw.
But this was pretty close to the Bradish they hoped to see. There’s every reason to think he can slot behind Corbin Burnes in a very good rotation.
“That’s the best part about today, getting him back out there and seeing him look normal,” catcher James McCann said. “I think this clubhouse is pretty excited to get someone like Kyle Bradish back on the mound for us.”
More spiciness between the Orioles and Juan Soto, please
Baseball is more invigorating with a Yankees villain in the mix. It just is.
Who could hate Judge, an agreeable giant who hits baseballs to the moon? Gerrit Cole is perhaps the best starter in baseball when healthy and ditched the Houston Astros for $324 million in Steinbrenner cash. But does he really stick in the imagination?
Soto, on the other hand, aced his audition for the role when he stared down Orioles starter Dean Kremer after launching a 447-foot home run onto Eutaw Street on Tuesday night. Kremer apparently isn’t a fan of the slugger’s flamboyant crouch between pitches, known as the “Soto Shuffle.”
“I bet he didn’t like the homer, too,” Soto snapped after the game.
“He hit a solo homer down three,” Kremer told reporters the next day. “That doesn’t really bother me.”
The home crowd gleefully booed Soto over the last two games of the series, while the many Yankees fans in Camden Yards clapped back in his favor. He embraced the theater, pausing an at-bat Thursday to gesture at some visual distraction in center field, then shaking his head disgustedly after a called strike three.
We should welcome every bit of this.
Soto is a magnificent hitter, immune to hacking at offerings outside the strike zone and vicious on balls that enter his wheelhouse. He has the confidence to match, and now that he’s swinging for the sport’s evil empire (well, historically anyway), he’s a beautiful foe for a new generation of Baltimore fans.
Grayson Rodriguez’s injury reminded us again of the terrible impermanence of pitching
Rodriguez flushed any lingering bad taste from his worst outing of the season with 5 2/3 scoreless innings against the Yankees. He threw his last fastball of the game 96.6 mph, betraying no sign of weakness. When he woke up the next morning, his right shoulder felt sorer than usual.
We all know a pitcher’s story can change faster than spring weather in Baltimore. We see it every week. That doesn’t make it any less of a gut punch when we’re talking about a right arm as mighty as Rodriguez’s.
The Orioles hope it’s not a significant injury, that after a few weeks’ rest, Rodriguez will be back in his spot as a bedrock member of a possible playoff rotation. Maybe they figure it’s easy to be cautious at a moment when they have multiple starters returning from injury anyway. But they don’t know for sure. No one does with a shoulder that serves as a fulcrum for the violent acceleration required to throw a 97 mph fastball or a power slider.
It’s a bummer viewing every gifted young starter as a time bomb, but what else is there to say, really?
“Right now, with pitching in general, you’re just hopeful,” Hyde said. “You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Even as the Orioles put Rodriguez on the shelf, they welcomed back Bradish and John Means, who will rejoin their rotation this weekend after a stellar final rehab start for Triple-A Norfolk. Means, who had Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery two years ago, is hoping to pitch something close to a full season for the first time since 2021.
As Hyde suggested, these comings and goings are endemic to almost every big league rotation. That’s why any worrying over a glut of Orioles starters was absurd. They’re going to need them all before the year is out.
Bullpen anxiety is going to be the way of things this season
The told-you-so backlash after Craig Kimbrel blew two saves last weekend was both deafening and misplaced given how well Kimbrel pitched before his back tightened up and robbed him of his command.
That said, Kimbrel at age 35 is a more volatile asset than he was in his prime as the game’s most dominant reliever. When the Orioles could not rely on him in the Oakland series or in the first two games against the Yankees, the structure of their bullpen wobbled. They got through it, with Danny Coulombe and Jacob Webb pitching effective ninth innings in close wins over New York, but in an ideal world, those guys are built to handle the sixth and seventh.
And that gets us to the real point; the Orioles won’t be operating in an ideal world for the next five months. It’s not possible in a sport that now demands three or four relievers a night, even when the starters are throwing well.
The Orioles have some solutions out of the rotation now that Bradish and Means are back. Albert Suárez can now unleash his fastball as either a long reliever or in high-leverage situations. Perhaps they’ll look to 6-foot-8 Keagan Gillies, with 70 strikeouts over his past 47 1/3 minor league innings, later in the season.
But Hyde acknowledged that the bullpen “limped into” the Yankees series after Kimbrel’s back injury, and he expects there to be other weeks like this.
Every so often, a team is lucky enough to mow through the late innings with a set sequence of pitchers. The Orioles fell into that category for much of last season with Yennier Cano and Félix Bautista at peak dominance. They were on the other end a decade ago, when the Kansas City Royals swept them out of the playoffs largely because they could hand the ball to Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland every night.
That’s rare.
“Doing this long enough now, as soon as you feel like you’re really, really healthy and you can start getting guys innings out of the bullpen, it flips immediately,” Hyde said. “Bullpen is always day to day. You try to be as consistent as you can down there, try to give guys the roles and the pockets of lineups they can handle and have success with. But so much stuff changes throughout the season.”
It’s unhealthy to panic every time the puzzle shifts because we know it’s going to happen. Anytime Kimbrel falters, fans will call for the Orioles to trade one of their hitting prospects for a closer. But their front office has been and should continue to be reluctant to sacrifice lasting value for someone who pitches one inning at a time. That’s not to say it couldn’t be a sensible option late in the summer, but they should treat it as a last resort.
The Orioles left little question they’re for real with a winning first month
We didn’t know for sure, right? When a young team improves by 31 games one year and another 18 the next, gravity might pull it back down.
Instead, the 2024 Orioles look a lot like the 2023 edition that won 101 games. Their offense — first in home runs, fourth in OPS, sixth in runs scored — is better as Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser come into their own. Despite the injuries that have struck their rotation, they’re allowing fewer runs per game, albeit with a slightly lower ERA+ because scoring is down overall. For all the fretting over Kimbrel, the bullpen’s performance, whether you look at ERA or strikeout and walk rates, is similar to last season.
If we want to go intangibles, the Orioles remain impossible to sweep, with a collective ability to spring back from their worst performances. You never get the sense this team feels daunted, that higher expectations have altered its mental or emotional composition.
Recall that in the club’s last winning era, the Orioles took an eight-game step back after busting out with 93 wins in 2012. They went 81-81 in 2015 after winning the AL East the year before. It’s too early to say for sure, but this time feels different, in part because of the incredible flow of young hitters still pushing their way up from Triple-A Norfolk.
Are there nits to pick as we examine the roster and consider how it will play in October? Of course, but April told us this rocket is still ascending. The Orioles are well past the point of needing to legitimize their success, but a series win over the Yankees, featuring three close, well-pitched games, provided a satisfying capper to this opening month.
“They’re important games,” McCann said. “You try not to make it more than what it is. It’s another game in April and May. But come September, it’s very easy to look back and say, ‘If only we had won that game.’ You don’t want to do that, so we’re very happy to leave that series winning three of four.”