For a catcher, Adley Rutschman is nearly singular in his workload and how often he plays — such is the importance of his presence both at and behind the plate to an Orioles team that in many ways is built around him.
So only he can know what it’s like to play as often as he does and feel the accumulation of all those baseballs thumping off his appendages, all those hours in a catcher’s squat, all those swings to stay ready on a daily basis.
And perhaps no one more than Rutschman himself knows how pivotal it is for him to be in the Orioles’ lineup as much as he is and how large an influence he has on them winning or losing on a given night.
That’s why seeing him swat a go-ahead home run to break a scoreless tie and jump-start the Orioles — and potentially himself — felt like a win within a win Sunday. He hasn’t been himself for a while, and if the Orioles have any hope of maintaining their advantaged status in the race for the American League playoffs — when they should have a handful of other vital pieces back from injury — they’re going to need the Rutschman who does this more often to return.
It’s impossible to know how long the back soreness that caused him to be scratched from Friday’s game and start Saturday’s on the bench existed, or whether there’s any coincidence that Rutschman’s production fell off drastically after he missed a game June 28 after a foul tip off his hand the night before. Granted, he homered in that June 27 game after the incident. All that’s evident is, since then, he’s had one of the toughest stretches of his professional baseball career.
He was hitting .177 with a .557 OPS from that point until Sunday’s game, and there’s a lot to unpack in that span, good and bad. The positives were he walked 7.2% of the time with an 18.2% strikeout rate before that, and he had brought both in the right direction in the time since, walking 11.2% of the time and striking out 11.9%. He’d been progressively bringing his walk rate up as June went on, and the dip in strikeout rate was much more characteristic of the approach Rutschman has come to be known for.
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The problem is, he simply wasn’t impacting the baseball the way he did as he raced to 16 home runs in the first 77 games of the season. There was only modest good fortune in doing so, too, as Rutschman’s .479 slugging percentage was only slightly better than the expected slugging percentage on his balls in play (.463), and that contact was often of the solid variety, with a 43.4% hard-hit rate.
In the ensuing 36 games, there was some bad luck mixed in — an actual batting average of .177 against an expected batting average of .243; an expected slugging percentage of .337 against an actual one of .274. But there was also a meaningful drop in hard-hit rate, down to 28.4%. There were no noticeable differences in bat speed or swing length, as measured by Statcast, so it came down to contact.
Rutschman was hitting the ball hard equally as often from the left and right sides before that foul tip off the hand, and his left-handed stats have suffered more since that time. That has been a conundrum for the Orioles as Eloy Jiménez is now in the mix for DH starts against righties with James McCann behind the plate.
The Orioles are scheduled to face three straight lefty starters this week against the Mets, which could create opportunities to give Rutschman more time out of the starting lineup and use him off the bench when needed. Of course, that’s easier said than done. It’s hard to leave him out of the lineup for many reasons.
It’s not as if manager Brandon Hyde needs more challenges these days. He already has a $13 million closer in Craig Kimbrel he can’t close games with, four starters (Kyle Bradish, John Means, Grayson Rodriguez and Tyler Wells) and three relievers (Félix Bautista, Danny Coulombe and Jacob Webb) he’d love to be able to use on the injured list, and a pair of first-choice infielders in Jordan Westburg and Jorge Mateo who are injured.
Figuring out a way to get Rutschman whatever time he needs to get back to himself isn’t one he probably wants to lean into. The allure of having someone like Rutschman — a switch-hitting catcher who can defend at a high level — is you don’t have to worry about who is catching most nights. It just feels like this little breather this weekend may have helped, and the Orioles shouldn’t shy away from anything else that can help beyond this.
They need the good Rutschman these last six weeks, and badly.
