John Means threw a no-hitter as an Oriole. That was pretty dope.
In a past era of the Orioles, when a player who had contributed to multiple fun teams departed in trade or as a free agent, I offered a Birdland Salute. This custom was initially extended to 2012 and 2014 O’s. Veterans of the 2022-2024 Orioles will also receive it.
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It’s not an exaggeration to say that John Means was a non-prospect from the day that the Orioles drafted him in 2014 until his emergence into the 2019 Orioles rotation picture. The MLB Pipeline top 30 Orioles list from the end of the 2018 season has no sign of Means while including such luminous scrap heap additions as Yefry Ramírez and Pedro Araújo. A FanGraphs list from before 2019 likewise has no Means while listing guys like Blaine Knight and Matthias Dietz.
In Means’s own telling, the lead-up to his major league debut at the close of the disastrous 2018 Orioles season was something of a chaotic mess. With no warning whatsoever, Means was asked if he had been keeping himself ready in the 3-4 weeks since the close of the minor league season. He hadn’t been, but he wasn’t going to tell them that, so he was thrust into one game at the end of that lost season, giving up five runs in 3.1 innings.
That could have just as easily ended up being the last time we ever thought of John Means. Instead, Means emerged from the depths of an already-sad Orioles farm system and quickly strode into the rotation. The plan did not start out with having him there, but he couldn’t be denied for long.
Means ended up being the best player on the 2019 team, a deserving All-Star in his rookie season on the way to finishing with 4.5 bWAR. He closed out the year with a 3.60 ERA, which in that period of inflated offense (and pre-Walltimore Camden Yards) was a 131 ERA+ – 31% better than league average. For some context, that’s an even better ERA+ than Corbin Burnes had with his 2.92 ERA for the 2024 Orioles.
We all know the highlight of that 2021 season, not just for Means as an individual player but for pretty much the entirety of the Orioles team, and for Orioles fans too. On May 5, 2021, Means threw the first solo no-hitter by an Orioles pitcher since Hall of Famer Jim Palmer hurled one in the 1969 season.
The no-no was a dropped third strike by Pedro Severino away from being a possible perfect game, making it a unique accomplishment in MLB history: His was the first no-hitter that was NOT a perfect game but also did not have him surrender a walk, hit a batter with a pitch, or have his team commit an error behind him.
The day after Means’s no-hitter, I wrote on Camden Chat that what was most remarkable about the feat was how much there was NOT any drama as the game escalated. Having watched other teams succeed at no-hitters over the years, I took it as a given that every no-hitter involves one or more plays where a defender makes a herculean effort that almost seems to exceed his normal ability, something he can summon in the moment of the late innings of a no-hitter-in-progress to preserve it.
No one had to do this to protect the Means no-hitter. It was about as ho-hum of a no-hitter as you can get. There were few, perhaps not even any, balls where you really needed to have any sort of panic when the camera cut from the batter to the view of the field after putting a ball in play. He dominated those guys, and this was a Mariners team that went on to win 90 games that season. It wasn’t like he no-hit the 2021 Orioles.
Four years later, I remain delighted by the fact that this happened. It seemed like one of those things I might just never get to see. Then, Means made magic happen in the midst of one more dismal Orioles season. It would have been a fine season for him without the no-hitter, a 3.62 ERA in 27 starts that again had him as the best O’s pitcher by far. With the no-hitter, it was the stuff of legends.
Now that a few years have gone by, there’s a sad quality to all of this because it looks like Means essentially pitched his arm off for those sad-sack Orioles. Four starts into his 2022 season, he suffered an injury to the ulnar collateral ligament that required Tommy John surgery. This meant that when the team’s fortunes reversed starting in July of that year, Means was reduced to something of an occasional mascot, a pleasant guy in the dugout and clubhouse who occasionally made hilarious appearances on MASN broadcasts mostly because he was bored.
A health setback in his rehab that was unrelated to the elbow ligament delayed Means from having much impact on the 2023 Orioles and their path to 101 wins as well. For all that Means only made four starts that year, one of them sure mattered a lot: In Cleveland, when the team had just lost the previous two games and its AL East lead seemed to be in danger of disappearing, Means took the mound and dominated, allowing just one run in a 7.1 inning start. The Orioles won the game, 2-1.
The next time Means pitched, the O’s had clinched the division, so in some ways this was the only game that mattered to the O’s that Means ever pitched in. His just-repaired elbow was sore again for the playoffs and ultimately he threw just four more games in 2024 before having to go back under the knife. It was a bummer for the fortunes of last year’s team and for Means’s career too. He deserved to have more of a place in Orioles legend than just the no-hitter. At least he got that much.
Means was drafted. He THREW A NO-HITTER AND IT WAS FREAKING AWESOME. He is Birdland. We shall never see his like again.
With Means’s departure, the players with the longest tenure in the Orioles organization are now Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle, each of whom arrived in the 2015 draft.