The biggest win of Ryan Helsley’s season? His young daughter can hear.

There are moments Ryan Helsley might have taken for granted earlier in his life, and the birds chirping in the trees late last month in Baltimore would have been one. He stepped outside, his 13-month-old daughter, Tatum, in his arms, and she looked up at those strange sounds.

She only recently became able to hear those sounds — the birds; the giggles of her older sister, Eliana; the endearment from her parents, Ryan and Alex Helsley; the everyday hubbub that is a gift to a little girl who can now hear.

“We can see and hear and taste and smell — all these things we take for granted,” said Ryan Helsley, the Orioles relief pitcher who is working his way back from an elbow injury. “They’re definites in our minds but they’re not guarantees, and we saw that firsthand. I think it just gave us a huge appreciation for our daughter — not that we would’ve loved her any less if she didn’t have it, but just how beautiful and fragile life can be.”

Over the last few months, Tatum’s world expanded to sound when she underwent cochlear implant surgery on both ears. Helsley, in the middle of his first season with the Orioles, departed the club for three days during the operations.

The nature of the baseball season, however, prevented him from spending ample time in Oklahoma with his family after those surgeries.

But about two weeks after each surgery — one in February and the second in April — Helsley’s younger daughter received her external sound processor and the cochlear implants were activated in each ear. And, during a long homestand in late May, Helsley’s wife and daughters flew to Baltimore, where they began to see how the medical procedures opened the world to their infant.

“Obviously, a pretty big last few months for our family,” Helsley said. “Just to get her reactions and you can make noises, whistle at her, say her name — she knows her name — she’ll turn and look at you, and she’s starting to talk a whole lot more.”

Before Tatum’s implants, the infant made what Helsley described as a humming noise. Hearing others speak is an important learning experience for young children, and she didn’t have that example. Now, though, Helsley said, Tatum is beginning to say “Mama” and “Dada.”

“I think her spirits are lifted, too,” Helsley said.

The spirits of her parents certainly are.

When Tatum was born early in 2025, indicators showed her hearing was compromised. The official hearing test a few weeks after her birth showed she was almost completely deaf in her right ear, “and the left ear was 50%. They said usually when one is so extreme, like her right one, it’ll pull the other one down a lot of times.”

As she grew older and it didn’t improve, Helsley said, Tatum became a prime candidate for cochlear implants, but there was trepidation surrounding the operations.

“It was for sure nerve-racking,” Helsley said. “You want the best for your kids, and right after she was born, you’re told she would need at least one major surgery, possibly two. That’s a pretty big gut punch for a parent, and we just started praying right away. Obviously, very anxious about it all.”

Helsley left the team during spring training for the first surgery on her right ear. In April, he drove from Kansas City to Oklahoma for the operation on Tatum’s left ear.

From afar, Helsley received updates about the first few weeks of hearing for Tatum, all while he focused on establishing himself as the closer for the Orioles. In one of the first videos he received, a bell rings. Tatum looks up, her attention captured.

“Small stuff like that,” Helsley said, “it’s a really cool experience from a parent’s perspective.”

In Tatum’s first few weeks with a sound processor implant on her skull, Eliana, her older sister, asked her father what it was and why she didn’t have one. Helsley, who wears contacts on the mound but glasses at home, told Eliana the implants “help her sister hear just like these glasses help Daddy see.”

“That was that,” Helsley said. “She’s a good big sister.”

He knows, someday, he and his wife will have to explain to Tatum the circumstances around her hearing implants. But Helsley plans to explain it the same way he did to Eliana — a necessity, just like his glasses.

Helsley, who’s embarking on rehab assignments with Triple-A Norfolk as he works back from elbow inflammation, feels the limitations to parenting that are part and parcel to major league life. The travel, the hours at the ballpark, it all adds up.

And during a health situation such as this, there is only so much time Helsley can take off during the season.

“You feel like you’re not doing enough as a parent, because you spend so much time on the road,” he said.

Those days he spent in Oklahoma for his daughter’s surgeries, though, were important. They were worth missing three days of the baseball season, so he could support Alex, Eliana and Tatum — before Alex Helsley took on the lion’s share of hands-on parenting over the next weeks and months.

“Our wives are rock stars and basically single moms with how much they handle stuff,” Helsley said. “I think that stuff can eat at you as a parent, especially when something that drastic happens to a child and you’re not there to take care of them and help.”

That made last month even more special. It was a silver lining to being on the injured list, Helsley said. With his wife and daughters visiting him in Baltimore, a walk outside with Tatum carried that special moment. The trill of birds in the trees caught Tatum’s attention, and Helsley’s heart soared.