Inside the Dugout: The Orioles who played through pain

Remember when James McCann took a pitch to the face and then stayed in the game last year?

I sure do, and I also remember a conversation I had the next day with someone on the Orioles’ staff about the message he hoped the rest of the clubhouse would take from seeing him, nostrils plugged with gauze, continuing on in that moment for the good of the team.

Seems like they got the message.

It turns out at the time Adley Rutschman was playing through back and hand injuries —which goes a long way to explain pretty much everything that seemed like it was wrong with him last year. This year, we’ve learned that Jackson Holliday’s knee has been bothering him for a while — enough discomfort to warrant an MRI — and that Colton Cowser played through broken ribs after his return from the injured list in June.

Combine that with what seemed like a slow physical decline for Jordan Westburg in April between the opening weekend of the season and his hamstring injury a month later, and you have a group that seemed to tough out a lot, and in almost every instance, saw their numbers dip as a result.

There’s no way for me or anyone who hasn’t worn a major league uniform in a game to know about the demands it takes to play this sport physically, every day for six months. There’s no way for anyone but the players and medical staff to know the extent of these injuries, how much better a week or two off could have made them, or how much worse they got when players remained in the lineup.

There’s also, if we’re being honest, probably very little that any kind of conservative period of rest and recovery could have done, long-term, to change the fate of this Orioles season. They were missing Cowser for the first two months of the season, didn’t have the best version of Gunnar Henderson for the first month, and veteran free agent signees Tyler O’Neill and Gary Sánchez were playing through their own issues that ultimately landed them on the injured list.

Combine that with an underperforming starting rotation, and no hitter who felt healthy enough to suit up, even with some kind of issue lingering, would choose not to when it meant leaving the team even more undermanned.

I get it all. I don’t blame any of them. I just hope that among all the other things these players have claimed to learn over the years from their quick playoff exits and this nightmare of the season, there’s some knowledge in those lessons that they’re better off healthy than playing hurt.

The impact is manifold. For the players, toughing out an injury for an extended period and not performing as a result only serves to dampen their production, along with their statistics, which after three major league seasons determine their salaries through the arbitration process.

For the team, it leaves a series of unanswerable questions about whether any kind of regression is health-related, skill-related or both. That complicates the Orioles’ offseason needs, as they may think health had more to do with a player struggling than it actually did, or vice versa. It’s not a fun way to go about building a roster.

As for me, the impact is clear: I realized at some point this year that I’m too quick to dismiss a poor stretch or month, or even season, from a player when I know an injury is involved. If I have conviction in someone’s talent and hear about some kind of physical issue that’s connected to when they started performing below that talent level, I almost immediately disregard whatever period they struggled in as not mattering because they were hurt.

I should be clear that most of the time, they’re not as good as they should be because they’re not 100%. If that feels obvious to say, that’s because it is. This year almost serves to verify that thesis. But I’m getting rid of it. No one is perfectly healthy for six months a season, and to forgive one player’s struggles in that context without knowing who else is in the same boat just isn’t fair.

I’m not going to completely disregard the information that is out there about who was playing through what at any point, but it’s not going to be so black and white for me anymore. The timing feels good to make that call. After all, it seems like even the healthy Orioles weren’t truly 100% for a while this year.

On the pod

An hour’s worth of questions and answers with interim manager Tony Mansolino and president of baseball operations Mike Elias left plenty to unpack for Paul and me. It took me a while to process it all. I’m still not sure how it left me feeling.

Ballpark chatter

“Talking to one of the recent hires here, Danny Haas, who was in New York with us, I asked him point-blank: ‘What do we have in terms of pitching down below?’ Because he was obviously with Washington, taking stock of our organization. … and he was very matter-of-fact that it’s going to be really good, what’s coming now.” – Mansolino on the Orioles’ pitching development potential.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know the minor league pitching operation has felt like a coiled spring to me over the last couple of years. It’s been hard to reconcile the lack of major league impact the program has had with that progress, but I’m glad Mansolino said this. It’s going to happen soon, and it might be good enough to make everyone forget how fallow it was for a while.

By the numbers

3.88

One of my favorite uses of this section ever was pointing out in April that Dean Kremer was going to stop being bad once April was over. He did just that, with a 3.57 ERA and 3.60 FIP with a 1.13 WHIP in 141 innings from May 1 on. That’s just good on a lot of levels. He now has a career 3.88 ERA after May 1, with a 4.12 FIP and a 1.25 WHIP, compared to a 6.24 ERA with a 5.53 FIP and a 1.48 WHIP before May 1. I badly hope to not have to revisit this in 2026.

Talent pipeline

Luis Guevara

Christian Frias, manager of the FCL Orioles, has one of the most challenging jobs you can imagine, given the youth of his roster, the cultural assimilation happening for players coming from the academy in the Dominican Republic, and the broader transition to professional baseball for so many. That job was made even more difficult by the loss of infielder Luis Guevara this year, and by all accounts, Frias was a force in helping his young club through that time. It’s hard to imagine anyone more deserving of the Cal Ripken Sr. Player Development Award than him.

For further reading

🎙️ End-of-season press conference: Danielle and Andy encapsulated all of Monday’s news well, both on the hiring and major takeaways fronts.

💰 New minority owner: Interesting to see the Orioles still adding minority investors. Those serve to add cash injections to the club, and to have one right before the offseason certainly makes me take note.

🧢 Not Tony Mansolino: It took guts for Kyle to write this and capture the nuance he did. It’s no indictment of Mansolino, and I think he made that clear.