If the combination of a day game after a night game and Arizona’s lefty starter means Samuel Basallo gets the afternoon off Wednesday, he’ll certainly have earned it.

The Orioles’ 21-year-old backstop caught four straight days for the first time in his professional career, and that kind of workload is what he can expect with Adley Rutschman out with an ankle injury.

Tuesday might have been our best glimpse yet of Basallo, in his first full major league season, as an everyday catcher. With his second home run in three games, his bat is heating up, and manager Craig Albernaz thinks that has to do with this extended run behind the plate. But there’s no tougher scale to be graded on than catching in the big leagues. Those that do it well can play forever, and you know who they are — look no further than the standing ovation former Orioles backup catcher James McCann received.

So even in a game when Basallo gave Albernaz a coaching opportunity on a first-inning wild pitch he didn’t retrieve fast enough, the Orioles’ bet is this extended time behind the plate pushes Basallo to another level there, too.

“His learning curve has been as excelled as you can be for a 21-year-old catcher who, realistically, doesn’t have a ton of minor league reps, because he’s smart, he pays attention and he cares,” Albernaz said. “Pitchers like throwing to him, and no matter what the circumstance, what happens in a game — good, bad, or indifferent, you can always have a conversation with him and he’s engaged, and he asks the right questions back. To me, that growth is going to be huge over the course of this season.”

Albernaz had the chance for one of those conversations early in Tuesday’s loss. It appeared from my vantage point to be rather one-sided. With two outs and the speedy Geraldo Perdomo on first, Trevor Rogers yanked a sweeper into the right-handed batter’s box with two outs in the first inning. By the time Basallo retrieved the ball, Perdomo had already taken second base and was rounding for third. Basallo and the Orioles were bailed out when he slid past the bag, allowing Blaze Alexander to put the tag on him.

Basallo and Albernaz had a brief exchange at the manager’s perch on the top step of the dugout before the manager, a former catcher himself, followed Basallo into the dugout for an extended conversation about the play. Catching instructor Joe Singley flanked him. After the game, Albernaz credited Basallo with getting the out at third but cut off his assessment of the rest of the play.

“Sammy, he’ll be better,” Albernaz said. On a later wild pitch from Rogers, he noted that Rogers threw two different types of changeups on back-to-back pitches and the latter took him by surprise, “but Sammy knows it — Sammy needs to make that play."

“He’s talented enough, and he works hard enough where that ball should be in front of him and not get by him,” Albernaz said.

That much has never been in doubt, even as Basallo shot to the majors as quickly as he did because of his bat. I was told before he even came stateside from the Dominican Republic that he always put in the work behind the plate and particularly gave attention to his pliability and movement, given how big he was even then. All through the minors, coaches praised how he worked pregame on his defense and how quickly he developed as a game-caller — the latter skill was aided by the recall and mental aptitude he had at the plate.

Now, though, it’s all under the microscope, and he’ll be held to as high a standard as there is by Albernaz and his staff. But they also wrote him in as catcher these last four games knowing it could help him at the plate as well. He had one home run and a .506 OPS entering Saturday, when Rutschman went on the injured list, and four of his five hits came on days when he caught rather than served as the designated hitter. He homered Sunday and had a second blast Tuesday as part of a two-hit day, bringing his OPS up to .640.

“At the start of the year, he kind of wasn’t in a spot where he wanted to be offensively, and when you DH, you’re kind of just in your own head, pretty much,” Albernaz said. “You can’t really have an outlet, so he’s taking advantage of this time where he’s behind the plate more, so now he can go behind the plate and think about guiding the pitcher through defensively, so it’s kind of freed him up mentally a little bit. I can speak from experience on that. It definitely gives you an outlet.”

That has been something of a defining trait for Basallo. He climbed through the minors mostly dominating older pitchers, and had to learn to be less critical of himself when things didn’t go his way. There’s less opportunity to do that when catching takes your mind off it.

The reality is that they need him to excel in both of his roles, and making that happen will be a challenge for all involved. Albernaz will need to manage his young catcher both gently and firmly. Basallo will have to hit to give himself some breathing room as he grows into this role.

And the Orioles will need to keep Albernaz’s own qualifiers in mind— that Basallo is relatively inexperienced behind the plate and cares a lot. If the latter helps him overcome whatever lapses his youth presents, and does so quickly, this Orioles season will be better for it.