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DL Hall remembers how it felt more so than what he accomplished.
He remembers the strikeout, of course, using a curveball on a full count to catch a Clemson commit swinging during a Georgia state playoff game. The stands were full of scouts and fans, and Hall, a freshman who entered in relief for Valdosta High School with the bases loaded, felt first the nerves, then the adrenaline, and finally, the stirring euphoria that spilled out in a yell and a fist pump and a third out.
He was addicted, right then and there.
“That adrenaline rush that I felt, I’ve been chasing it,” Hall said, standing in the Orioles clubhouse with his mind miles south, recalling the first time he felt the stress and joy of major competition. “I’ve been chasing it since high school, that playoff feeling, those big-game situations. The high you get from that is something that’s indescribable. It’s definitely something I chase after. I feel like for us as athletes, that’s like the mecca for us, that feeling.”
On Saturday, Hall and his Orioles teammates will experience it again in the American League Division Series. For many of them, it will be their first taste of the pressure and attention that comes with October baseball — the packed crowds, the prime-time viewership, the knowledge that a loss could send them home.
To the few players in Baltimore’s clubhouse who have competed in a major league postseason environment, they say nothing in their baseball lives can compare. But for a clubhouse largely ignorant to what it feels like at the highest level, those young players are leaning on whatever experience they do have.
They have all competed in national tournaments and prospect showcases. They’ve made minor league playoff runs, reached Omaha, Nebraska, for the College World Series or felt the anticipation for a game-changing at-bat, whether that came in April or August or October.
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“You’ve watched it on TV, it’s always been kind of that mythical creature in the back of your mind,” Ryan O’Hearn said of the postseason. “I want to know. I want to experience it. I’ve seen it on TV for so long, I’ve heard about it for so long from so many guys over in Kansas City, and I just have the mindset of whatever it is, I’m ready for it. Whatever it’s going to be, however it’s going to be.”
When the playoff-less players ask around to some of the veterans in the room — be it Jacob Webb, Aaron Hicks, Adam Frazier, Kyle Gibson or James McCann — they tell them nothing, and everything is the same.
That is, when players take the field for the first time in a playoff game, there will be those wide-eyed looks at a raucous crowd. But pretty soon, they’ll realize a game is still 27 outs, even if the circumstances increase.
“When you’re in Omaha, that’s all you know. That’s the biggest game of your life at that point,” McCann said. He experienced it with Arkansas. Heston Kjerstad also made the trip to Omaha with the Razorbacks, and Adley Rutschman won it all as a member of Oregon State.
“I’m curious to compare it to if it’s similar to the jitters I had going into College World Series,” Rutschman said of this postseason.
Gibson acknowledged the trips into college postseason play were his first introduction to anything of this nature, even though Missouri didn’t make it as far as some of his teammates’ college squads did. Playing in Omaha meant playing in front of 30,000-plus fans for the first time, and it meant doing so on national television.
Take Omaha, McCann said, then multiply the feeling.
But still, at its core, it’s all the same — even as they tell the younger players it’s all different.
“The quicker you can realize the pitcher still has to throw the ball over the plate, and you still have to hit a round ball with a round bat, it’s still the same game,” McCann said. “You can put the environment to the side. It’s a cool environment. It’s what you dream of. So when you’re able to identify it’s just the same game, the same game you’ve played all year, then you can actually enjoy the environment instead of the environment eating away at you.”
At this point of the season, though, the Orioles won the American League East and earned the top seed with 101 wins by winning in imposing environments.
They battled with the Atlanta Braves at Truist Park, they felt the buzz at Rogers Centre in Toronto, they turned Yankee Stadium quiet and made Camden Yards bounce again with reverberating sound off the B&O Warehouse. There’s something to learn from those games, too.
“If you’re going to go through some of these big situations and try to play it off and try to make it not anything, and you’re not going to take a mental note of it, then how do you go back and dig in and say, ‘Oh, I remember this. This feels just like here,’” Gibson said. “If you’re not doing that, and you’re not remembering that, you’re going to get there and feel like that’s somewhere you’ve never been before, and it’s going to speed up.”
Most of these players haven’t been here before — at least in real life. They’ve all dreamt of it, though, pretending the whiffle ball battle was on the grand stage, with two outs in the ninth inning of the World Series, with the fate of a franchise resting on their shoulders.
This weekend, those dreams will come true. And despite a lack of experience here, none of them are backing down from the unknown.
“You put these situations in your head when I’m 8 years old in the backyard playing with my friends,” Hall said of reaching the postseason. “Things like that are stuff you make up in the backyard. This is something we’ve been waiting for for a long time, so I think we’ll all rise to the occasion.”
andy.kostka@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Andy Kostka is an Orioles beat writer for The Baltimore Banner. He previously covered the Orioles for The Baltimore Sun. Kostka graduated from the University of Maryland and grew up in Rockville.
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