Was it a secret injury? Random statistical variance? The first sign of concerning and ongoing problems?
Eight years ago, at the tail end of a different era of the Orioles, Adam Jones had a terrible start to his season. After about five weeks of stinking it up, there was a widespread assumption that he must be playing through some kind of injury. Asked about this, Jones memorably replied, “Sometimes you suck, man. It happens. You suck sometimes in sports.” Jones batted .200/.269/.274 over his first 26 games. He definitely sucked.
The second half of Adley Rutschman’s 2024 season brings the Jones theory of baseball to mind. Repeatedly throughout and after a post-break stretch of baseball during which Rutschman batted .207/.282/.303, Rutschman, manager Brandon Hyde, and general manager Mike Elias insisted that there was no specific issue going on that might have meant Rutschman just needed two weeks on the injured list to get over something. It was, if anything, attributed to the general wear and tear on catchers.
I never actually believed that Jones wasn’t hurt. The guy was generally known for playing through minor dings, and it was his most prolonged period of struggle since his breakout as a player. In any case, by the time that people started asking Jones whether he was hurt, he’d already broken out of whatever it was. Jones had six hits in the two games before his famous reply, and he OPSed .783 for the remainder of the season.
If the Rutschman story for 2024 had gone the same way. the Orioles season would have probably gone better than it did. That’s not how it worked out. Rutschman’s slump went on for two months longer than Jones’s “Sometimes you suck” slump. He barely hit for any kind of power for half of the season, or did much of any kind of hitting. He certainly did not break out of the struggle by the time people started noticing and asking about it, as Jones did.
Were these months spread across the season instead of consecutively, that would seem more like random noise. The months were connected, so it all feels connected. The fact that Rutschman hit for more power in the first half of the season is almost drowned out by his second half of struggle. He ended up dropping more than 100 points of OPS in his season-long numbers. He didn’t even end up with as many home runs as in 2023, dropping from 20 to 19.
Just about any sort of measurable number on MLB’s Statcast for Rutschman declined compared to prior years and in the one measure that debuted in 2024 – bat speed – he was in the 13th percentile of all players. Hard hit rate? Dropped. Arm strength? Down. Speed, when he was already slow? That took a hit too. Even his previously-elite walk rate that he’d showed in his first two seasons ultimately took a tumble.
It’s easier to think about the future if Rutschman was actually going through some kind of nagging injury that’s going to take an offseason to heal up fully. As the slump dragged on across the second half of the season, the fact that it seemed to begin right about when Rutschman took a foul ball off of his throwing hand while catching in late June loomed larger and larger. Open and shut case, right?
Maybe not. Were the source of Rutschman’s issues something in his right hand, we might expect to see for the switch-hitter that things were going worse when he was batting right-handed, with the speculated injured hand as the top hand. That’s not the way that it went. Rutschman OPSed .631 while batting left-handed and .902 while batting righty. It’s a complicating factor to what has otherwise seemed the simplest answer to the problem.
If, on the other hand, this is some kind of wear and tear issue that needs to be managed even though this was only the age 26 season for Rutschman, that’s rough. It’s not like this was a heavy workload as the team’s primary catcher. He started 99 games at the position. That’s more than half of the season’s games, but it’s not close to “he was overworked” level. Whether it is a coincidence or not, these were Rutschman’s batting splits by position:
- As catcher: .231/.299/.351 (99 starts)
- As designated hitter: .298/.366/.488 (42 starts)
Were he providing obvious defensive value when making the starts at catcher, handwaving away the gap in offense would be easier. It’s a striking difference that could be random statistical noise but it feels meaningful in the context of everything else going on.
The numbers don’t point to the idea of Rutschman offering massive, unquestionable defensive value, nor does the way that the Orioles behaved. It wasn’t Rutschman who was getting the starts when ace Corbin Burnes was on the mound. That included the O’s brief postseason experience, where Rutschman was the starting DH in the lineup for Game 1 with Burnes on the mound. One more reason for this is that Rutschman was once an elite framer and in 2024 he was not any more.
No one wants this to be the new normal. A subset of Orioles fans who are prone to panic have already taken it for granted that this is the case, anxiously eyeing the Bobby Witt Jr. ascent in Kansas City and wondering if the Orioles actually made the wrong choice with the #1 draft pick in 2019. This would be more of a valid discussion point in the event that Witt repeats or exceeds his 2024 numbers while Rutschman repeats or falls below his own 2024 numbers. It would be nicer to not have to think about that kind of thing.
What does the Orioles front office make of all of this? They aren’t terribly likely to come out and say it directly. The strategy they pursue in finding a backup catcher for 2025 might tell us something. If they sign or acquire a player who has been a starting catcher, that could point towards having more of a 50/50 split between Rutschman and another catcher. This is a determination that will have longer-term impact as well, with the team’s #1 prospect now being Samuel Basallo, who could potentially arrive towards the end of next season.
Rutschman’s runner-up finish for the AL Rookie of the Year award in 2022 guaranteed that he received a full year of service time even though he wouldn’t have qualified based on days on the roster. That means the 2024 season was the third of Rutschman’s pre-arbitration years and he’ll have three arbitration years to come. He’s projected by MLB Trade Rumors for a $5.8 million arbitration salary in his first time going through that process.
That’s a paltry sum compared to what even a struggling Rutschman is worth. He notched 3.4 bWAR and 2.8 fWAR for 2024. It took actually hitting well in April, May, and June to reach those numbers. There will be uncomfortable considerations before the end of Rutschman’s team control (after the 2027 season) if he does not return to the form he established in his rookie and sophomore seasons. I’m not going to worry about that until at least the middle of May next year. Hopefully he comes out of the gate hot at the plate and I never have to worry about it at all.
Tomorrow: Jordan Westburg