The Homer Hose, the Adley Hug and a perfect clubhouse mix: How the Orioles went from laughingstock to contender
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
KANSAS CITY — Austin Hays debuted for the Baltimore Orioles as a late September call-up in 2017 at 21, a year after Baltimore made its last playoff appearance. The next season, spent by Hays at Double-A, they went 47-115. He returned to the big leagues to play for a 108-loss team in 2019, slogged through the pandemic season (25 wins) and weathered a 110-loss 2021 in hopes of something better. Hope and faith were elemental to everyone in the Orioles’ universe, players and fans alike, because without them, the sort of misery that enmeshed the franchise would be too much.
Hays is now 27, and in the afterglow of another victory Monday, he marveled at what surrounded him. The Orioles, now carrying the third-best record in Major League Baseball at 21-10, are not flukes. Yes, they’ve had an easy schedule, and, certainly tougher days are ahead, with the combined winning percentage of the teams they face in their next eight series .605 — a collective 98-win pace. But their formula — outhit the opponent and withstand middling starting pitching with a bullpen that has the best Fielding Independent Pitching number in all of baseball — is replicable. And the coalescing of the Baltimore clubhouse — a well-balanced mixture of homegrown players with whom he ascended through the minor leagues, survivors of the Orioles’ lowest moments and imports finding the best versions of themselves — heartens Hays.
“The three of those groups have just bonded together so well here,” he said. “And it’s created just a really good atmosphere and culture. The team is good. We have talent, but there’s a lot of teams that have talent in the locker room just doesn’t mesh. It’s just meshed so well. It’s created a really great culture here.”
Catcher Adley Rutschman is quick to point out that culture and winning, though often bedfellows, are not the same thing. Culture, he said, is more about “having a lot of guys on board with the same mindset and the same kind of collective goal. It takes a lot of responsibility off individuals and just makes it more of a teamwide thing, which I really love about our team.”
Even if the Orioles’ whole is greater than the sum of its parts, those parts matter. In addition to Hays (OPSing .848), the survivors include centerfielder Cedric Mullins (with a .375 on-base percentage in the leadoff hole), first baseman Ryan Mountcastle (a team-leading eight home runs), outfielder Anthony Santander (coming off a 33-homer season) and right-hander Dean Kremer (the best remaining player acquired in their 2018 trade-deadline purge). “Even though we stunk, I have a ton of fond memories for a lot of players that were here my first couple years,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “Because those guys played their heart out for me.”
Baltimore general manager Mike Elias didn’t just sit around waiting for the prospects to join the burgeoning core. In August 2021, Baltimore placed a waiver claim on shortstop Jorge Mateo, who blossomed last year, broke out this year and is currently eighth among position players in Wins Above Replacement. Standout reliever Bryan Baker came via waivers, too, three months later, and lefty reliever Cionel Perez two weeks after that. Right-hander Yennier Cano, author of 11 hitless, walk-free innings to start the season, arrived in a trade last July in which the Orioles, on the fringes of contention, dealt closer Jorge Lopez to Minnesota.
Though controversial at the time, the Lopez trade did little to affect the Orioles’ ascendancy. It seemed to come down to this: No longer were players coming to the stadium every day with the knowledge a cavernous talent gap existed between them and their opponent. Even if the Orioles’ payroll was embarrassingly low — 30th of 30 teams last season, 29th at an estimated $83 million this year — they were no longer outclassed before the first pitch.
“Being in a game every night where every at-bat the game’s on the line, you have a chance to put the team ahead, it makes the game so much more fun and it just makes it easy to bring energy,” Hays said. “And going through that has just made the game so much more enjoyable for us. There’s nothing to take for granted. We come in every day excited to try to win a game because we know where it can be and how far away we are from that now.”
THE THIRD GROUP inside the Orioles’ clubhouse — the kids — makes them truly interesting. Tanking teams thrive or crumble based on the success of their ability to draft and develop, and Baltimore already has firmly established itself in the former category — and that’s with a farm system that even after a slew of high-profile graduations remains among the best in the game.
The arrival last year of Rutschman, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft, signaled the beginning of a new era. Since his May 21 debut, the Orioles are 87-64, better than all but five teams, each of which carry championship aspirations: Houston, Toronto, Atlanta, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets.
In less than a year, Rutschman has established himself as an archetypal franchise player: wildly talented, willing leader and giver of his now-signature Adley Hug — most of which are delivered to far larger men. No mite at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, Rutschman often finds himself swallowed up by Felix Bautista (6-8, 285) and Cano (6-4, 245).
“It’s definitely a good hug when a guy of his caliber comes out after pitching a tough ninth, which usually comes with a lot of pressure,” Cano said through Brandon Quinones, the team’s translator and baseball communications assistant. “Getting that hug from him is a really nice feeling. I’ve been able to work with several different catchers, but when I get to work with Adley, it’s like he already knows what pitch I want to throw, and he calls them immediately. So it’s great to work with him and I’d be super happy if I got to work with him the rest of my career.”
That sentiment is quickly gaining traction around the major leagues. If he’s not there already, Rutschman is not far off the title of best catcher in all of MLB — and yet still humble enough to express a whit of self-doubt as to the quality of his hugs.
“You can’t say, oh, I’m a good hugger,” Rutschman said. “It’s like someone saying, oh, I’m a really nice guy. Well, no, other people get to decide that for you. You don’t get to decide that. But also Bautista and Cano haven’t given me any feedback, so I don’t know if they’re just being nice.”
They are not. Truth is, everyone around Baltimore’s clubhouse adores Rutschman. Certainly his on-field brilliance — a switch hitter, he is slashing .315/.429/.472 with four home runs and more walks than strikeouts — helps matters. But it’s more than that.
“He lives up to every expectation,” said veteran right-hander Kyle Gibson, who signed as a free agent with Baltimore over the winter. “He takes pride in his catching. He offensively obviously is switching, so it’s twice the work as most guys. And I haven’t gotten into the weeds with him on it, but my guess is he enjoys the work because if you’re a catcher, you have to really enjoy the work, and he has really high expectations for himself. You can tell.”
And Rutschman represented just the start of the emergence of Baltimore’s young core. Next came third baseman Gunnar Henderson, who had taken over as the top prospect following Rutschman’s promotion. Then outfielder Kyle Stowers, followed by their top pitching prospect, Grayson Rodriguez, and one of their plethora of middle infielders, Joey Ortiz. Still to come, likelier sooner than later: outfielder Colton Cowser and infielder Jordan Westburg, who are raking at Triple-A, and Heston Kjerstad, doing the same at Double-A. Not far behind: Jackson Holliday, the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft who’s already in High-A and will play the entire season at 19 years old.
When Gibson signed with Baltimore on a one-year, $10 million deal, he knew of the talent the Orioles’ young players possessed but not the people they were. Throughout the spring, he learned, they’re an almost universally grown-up group, kids in age only, and that whatever the Orioles were doing to develop them, it was working.
“I never would’ve guessed that all these guys had a good head on their shoulders,” Gibson said. “In spring training, there wasn’t any stupid stuff going on. They all took care of it like pros. You just don’t normally have a team of young guys that professional. … They’re never late. Just the mental mistakes that you normally see with young guys aren’t there on or off the field. So it’s got to be internal. It’s just too much of a coincidence not to be.”
TUNE INTO AN Orioles game and you’re likely to be treated to a show. When a Baltimore player hits a single, he looks toward his teammates and twists his wrist — turning on the offensive faucet. A double prompts the runner to do the Sprinkler dance — and the dugout obliges, with those on the top step spewing streams of water. For home runs, the Orioles break out a funnel — known officially as the Homer Hose and colloquially as the Dong Bong — and chug water.
The liquid theme came from Rutschman — “Adley is usually our ideas guy,” Stowers said, “he’s our creative”– who earlier this spring debuted it at the team’s annual talent show for rookies. Rutschman wasn’t sure if he technically qualified — for finishing second in the American League Rookie of the Year voting last year, he was awarded a full year of service time — but once he knew his teammates expected participation, he rounded up Henderson, Stowers, Cowser and utilityman Terrin Vavra and prepared for a performance as “Fountain Financial.” It was such a hit, the encore went teamwide.
Rutschman’s ubiquity in the clubhouse is no accident. He takes leadership seriously, understanding his position as the franchise’s fulcrum and giving everyone what they need, whether it’s a celebratory postgame hug or a good-luck pregame embrace. Stowers is typically the recipient of that. After Rutschman goes through his customary hand slaps, he and Stowers raise their right arms, lower their left arms and move in for some love.
“It’s comforting,” Stowers said. “We kind of look at each other before a game. Here we go, got each other’s backs. It’s like, no matter what happens, we’re here for each other.
“I’ve only been in the organization since 2019, but each year you meet the first-round pick of the draft and you go, man, that’s a really good guy, a team-oriented guy who wants to win and help the team win,” Stowers continued. “And we’ve talked about this. I know you say not to talk too much about it, but it starts with the first overall pick. Being someone who’s humble. Works hard and does things the right way. Because if that guy’s humble, then everyone else is going to follow suit.”
Rutschman doesn’t want the Orioles to get too far ahead of themselves. As good as life is now, as promising as the future may be even in a pitiless AL East, baseball is an unrelenting challenge, and the moment Baltimore starts to buy the hype, it’s liable to return to that place no one wants to go.
So he preaches the same things that got the Orioles where they are. In the minor leagues, Rutschman said, he was struck by how the team’s prospects prioritized winning — even at levels where winning doesn’t much matter — over climbing to the major leagues. The balance between individual and team that is so difficult to strike in the minor leagues, he said, is Three Little Bears-level just right.
“Somehow our guys were still focused on that team aspect of caring about the guy next to him and asking guys how they’re doing, what they’re going through,” Rutschman said. “And to me that’s a huge part of the team aspect, and I think you can lose that in the minor leagues and then when you get to big leagues turn that back on. But I don’t think guys are having to turn it back on.”
And so this franchise, a laughingstock for nearly half a decade, witness to far more ughs than hugs, finds itself reckoning with a phenomenon long ago abandoned in Baltimore: relevancy. Losing, Mullins said, helped teach the Orioles to savor winning, and now they’re ever hungrier for it.
“I think we come in with a purpose every single day: winning games,” Mullins said. “And it’s not just feeling like we want to. It’s knowing that we can.”
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A combination of severe hurricane damage to Tropicana Field and political delays on financing means it is highly unlikely the Tampa Bay Rays‘ planned new stadium will be ready for the 2028 season, if at all, the team said Tuesday.
Rays top executives said in a letter to the Pinellas County Commission that the team has already spent $50 million for early work on the new $1.3 billion ballpark and cannot proceed further because of delays in approval of bonds for the public share of the costs.
“The Rays organization is saddened and stunned by this unfortunate turn of events” said the letter, signed by co-presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman, who noted that the overall project was previously approved by the County Commission and the City of St. Petersburg.
“As we have made clear at every step of this process, a 2029 ballpark delivery would result in significantly higher costs that we are not able to absorb alone,” the letter added.
The tumultuous series of events came after Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off Tropicana Field on Oct. 9, forcing the Rays to play the 2025 season at the spring training home of the New York Yankees, 11,000-seat Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. Then, the Pinellas County Commission postponed a planned Oct. 29 vote on the bond issue that the Rays said has thrown the new 30,000-seat ballpark timeline off.
The commission was meeting again Tuesday on the bond issue, but its chair suggested a vote could be delayed again.
“We know we’re going to be in Steinbrenner in 2025 and we don’t know much beyond that,” Auld said in an interview.
Asked if Major League Baseball can survive long-term in the Tampa Bay area, Rays Principal Owner Stuart Sternberg said the outlook is “less rosy than it was three weeks ago. We’re going to do all that we can, as we’ve tried for 20 years, to keep the Rays here for generations to come.”
The team’s contract with the city of St. Petersburg requires that the Rays play three more seasons at Tropicana Field assuming it is repaired. The cost of fixing the ballpark in time for the 2026 season is pegged at more than $55 million for a building scheduled to be torn down when the new facility is ready.
Under the original plan, Pinellas County would spend about $312.5 million for the new ballpark and the city of St. Petersburg around $417 million including infrastructure improvements. The Rays and their partner, the Hines development company, would cover the remaining costs including any overruns.
It isn’t just baseball that is affected. The new Rays ballpark is part of a larger urban renovation project known as the Historic Gas Plant District, which refers to a predominantly Black neighborhood that was forced out by construction of Tropicana Field and an interstate highway spur.
The broader $6.5 billion project would transform an 86-acre (34-hectare) tract in the city’s downtown, with plans in the coming years for a Black history museum, affordable housing, a hotel, green space, entertainment venues, and office and retail space. There’s the promise of thousands of jobs as well.
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Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff Writer
It was easy to wonder if there might be a little bit of a hangover this season. Mike Norvell weathered a strange, stair-stepping climb to greatness with Florida State — his Seminoles went 3-10 in his first 13 games, then 9-6 in the next 15, then won 19 in a row — but endured one of the most gut-wrenching season finishes you’ll ever see. First, the unbeaten Noles were snubbed out of a spot in the final four-team College Football Playoff; then, with a number of starters having either opted out or opted for season-ending surgery, they got completely humiliated 63-3 by Georgia in the Orange Bowl.
Norvell said all the proper things in spring ball, and despite 14 new starters, his reputation for finding difference-makers in the transfer portal got FSU ranked 10th in the preseason AP poll. But instead of a hangover, or a slow start, his Noles have completely no-showed in 2024.
Florida State’s win percentage has fallen by 82.9 percentage points at the moment, from 0.929 to 0.100. In the history of top-division college football, there have been 14,788 teams; only three have had their win percentage fall by more than that, and two played during World War I: 1917 Colorado State (from 6-0-1 to 0-7-1), 1919 Colorado Mines (from 4-0 to 0-4-2) and 2012 Southern Miss (from 12-2 to 0-12). The Seminoles are likely to finish 2-10, beating Charleston Southern this coming weekend and then losing to rival Florida. Those results would drop them to merely the eighth-largest win percentage collapse ever, behind four more teams from 1950 or earlier.
If you prefer advanced stats, FSU has also cratered by that measure: The Seminoles finished ninth in SP+ last season but are currently 92nd. In terms of percentile ratings, they’ve fallen from 94.1% to 33.0%. Granted, there’s still a sliver of friendly preseason projections impacting the current ratings, so the Noles could fall even further over the last couple of games, but that 61.1% drop is still the 40th largest on record and the fourth largest of the 2000s behind 2018 Louisville (from 87.8% to 15.1%), 2012 Southern Miss (from 73.1% to 4.5%) and 2009 Ball State (from 75.6% to 12.5%).
Like FSU with Jordan Travis, all three of those 21st century peers lost star quarterbacks from breakthrough teams — Southern Miss lost Conference USA-winning Austin Davis, Ball State lost Nate Davis and Louisville lost Heisman winner Lamar Jackson — and both BSU (Brady Hoke) and Southern Miss (Larry Fedora) had lost their respective head coaches to bigger jobs. Louisville, meanwhile, ended the Bobby Petrino era 10 games into 2018, as his Cardinals kept getting worse and worse.
Norvell isn’t a first-year coach, and by all accounts it appears he will keep his job into 2025, even if it has required the jettisoning of assistants. I like turning to the history books to get an idea for what might happen in the future, but this one’s tricky: When a team collapses with this level of force, it’s usually at either the start or end of a coach’s tenure (or, in the case of Southern Miss’ Ellis Johnson in 2012, both).
Acknowledging both the uniqueness of the coaching situation and the severity of the fall, however, I did find 10 reasonably decent comps. Here are 10 postwar, major-conference teams (or major independents) that (a) collapsed by at least 50.0% in terms of both SP+ percentile rating and win percentage, (b) did so with a coach that was not in his first season and (c) kept that coach for the following season. How long did it take each program to rebound? Did it happen under the same coach? Let’s take a look.
1946 Oklahoma State
Head coach: Jim Lookabaugh (eighth year)
Change in record: from 9-0 to 3-7-1
Change in SP+ ranking: from seventh to 82nd
What happened: Like Mike Gundy, Lookabaugh was a former OSU player who thrived as the Cowboys’ head coach. In 1944-45, they went 17-1, winning a Cotton Bowl and a Sugar Bowl and claiming a share of the 1945 national title. But in the postwar years, his program fell back to where it was prewar. Following their collapse in 1946, they went 3-7 again in 1947 before rebounding to go 6-4 with a Delta Bowl bid — they lost 20-0 to William & Mary — in 1948. Following a 4-4-2 season in 1949, Lookabaugh retired and moved into real estate.
The Cowboys’ next good season: 1953. Jennings Whitworth led the Pokes to a 7-3 campaign and parlayed that into the Alabama job a year later.
1956 Notre Dame
Head coach: Terry Brennan (third year)
Change in record: from 8-2 to 2-8
Change in SP+ ranking: from 12th to 84th
What happened: A star halfback for Notre Dame in the postwar years, Brennan was rushed into the head-coaching role at age 25 following Frank Leahy’s health-related retirement. He steered the ship well for a while, going 17-3 in 1954-55, but things fell apart during a massive youth movement in 1956 (albeit one in which Paul Hornung still won the Heisman). The growing pains produced improvement in the coming years, and Notre Dame was talented enough to end Oklahoma’s famed 47-game winning streak with a 7-0 upset in 1957 and finish 10th in the AP poll. But for the most part, the Irish were merely solid in 1957-58, beating poor teams, mostly losing to good ones and going 13-7 overall. Brennan was fired with a 32-18 record and replaced by NFL coach Joe Kuharich, who went just 17-23.
The Fighting Irish’s next good season: 1964. Granted, 1957 was pretty good under Brennan, but the Irish were mediocre for quite a few years under Kuharich and Hugh Devore before first-year coach Ara Parseghian engineered a 9-1 charge and No. 3 AP finish in 1964. They would win the national title two years later.
1960 SMU
Head coach: Bill Meek (fourth year)
Change in record: from 5-4-1 to 0-9-1
Change in SP+ ranking: from 34th to 91st
What happened: After landing his first head-coaching job at age 30, Bill Meek was 36 when he took over at SMU in 1957, with the team less than a decade removed from back-to-back top-10 finishes. Led by Dandy Don Meredith’s passing, the Mustangs finished 18th in the AP poll in 1958, and they began 1959 ranked fourth. But they went just 5-4-1 against a brutal schedule (they were 1-4 against ranked opponents), then totally collapsed in 1960 following Meredith’s graduation.
Meek stayed for 1961 but went just 2-7-1 and moved on to front office roles with the Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys. SMU replaced him with Hayden Fry.
The Mustangs’ next good season: 1966. Fry’s tenure began with four straight losing seasons, but he brought the Mustangs back to the Cotton Bowl, with a No. 10 AP finish, in Year 5.
1961 Illinois
Head coach: Pete Elliott (second year)
Change in record: from 5-4 to 0-9
Change in SP+ ranking: from 36th to 103rd
What happened: An All-America quarterback at Michigan, Elliott led Cal to the Rose Bowl in 1958 before returning to the Big Ten to succeed Ray Eliot in 1960. Eliot had gone just 32-35-5 since a Rose Bowl bid in 1951, and Elliott went just 5-4 in his first season before an absolute collapse in Year 2. He was building something, though. After going just 2-7 in 1962, a talented Illini squad led by All-Americans Dick Butkus and Archie Sutton charged to 8-1-1 and won the Rose Bowl. They were above .500 in 1964 and ’65, too, but Elliott resigned in 1967 when Illinois became embroiled in a slush fund scandal.
The Illini’s next good season: 1963. The Illini beat two top-five teams (Northwestern and Michigan State) and topped Washington 17-7 in the Rose Bowl. This collapse actually had a happy ending of sorts. As long as you ignore that whole “slush fund” thing.
1985 Boston College
Head coach: Jack Bicknell (fifth year)
Change in record: from 10-2 to 4-8
Change in SP+ ranking: from 11th to 62nd
What happened: We’ve heard a lot about the “Flutie effect” through the years, where a school that enjoys sudden football success sees a burst of notoriety, higher application rates and so on. The initial effects of losing Flutie, however, weren’t great for Boston College. Following Flutie’s Heisman run and BC’s 10-win campaign and top-five finish in 1984, the Eagles quickly fell back to earth with poor Shawn Halloran behind center in 1985. After a wobbly 3-3 start, they lost five in a row and finished 4-8.
BC began 1986 in poor form again, starting just 1-3, but Halloran and the Eagles won eight straight from there, eventually beating Georgia 27-24 in the Hall of Fame Bowl.
The Eagles’ next good season: 1986. The rebound was swift. It was also short-lived. Bicknell would average just 3.5 wins over the next four seasons and, in 1991, he moved on to become head coach of the World League of American Football’s Barcelona Dragons, and in 1992-93 the Eagles surged briefly under Tom Coughlin.
1991 Louisville
Head coach: Howard Schnellenberger (seventh year)
Change in record: from 10-1-1 to 2-9
Change in SP+ ranking: from 32nd to 103rd
What happened: I’m including Louisville here even though there was nothing “major” about the Cardinals program before Schnellenberger got a hold of it. They had finished ranked only once — they went 9-1 under Lee Corso in 1972 and finished 18th as part of the Missouri Valley — but finished under .500 every year from 1979-87. After going 14-8 under Schnellenberger in 1988-89, however, they charged to 10-1-1 and walloped No. 25 Alabama 34-7 in the Fiesta Bowl. It was a miraculous building job, but with quarterback Browning Nagle off to the pros and replacement Jeff Brohm injured early in the season, the Cardinals fell apart in 1991. They would rebound to 5-6 with a healthy Brohm in 1992, then broke through the following season.
The Cardinals’ next good season: 1993. Brohm threw for 2,626 yards (a good number for the day), and the Cardinals upset No. 23 Arizona State as part of a 7-1 start. They capped a 9-3 season with an 18-7 comeback win over Michigan State in the Liberty Bowl. Schellenberger would leave for Oklahoma a year later.
1998 Washington State
Head coach: Mike Price (10th year)
Change in record: from 10-2 to 3-8
Change in SP+ ranking: from 14th to 71st
What happened: Mike Price built a cyclical power in Pullman. The Cougars would slowly grow as a roster core matured, break through with a certain level of experience and then start over again. However, following the success of quarterback Ryan Leaf & Co. in 1997 — Wazzu won 10 games, reached the Rose Bowl for just the second time and finished in the AP top 10 for the first time — it took a little while to put the pieces back together. The Cougs went just 10-24 from 1998-2000. But Price’s next awesome quarterback, Jason Gesser, led a charge starting in 2001.
The Cougars’ next good season: 2001. The Cougs started 7-0, lost only to Oregon and Washington, both ranked, and beat Purdue 33-27 in the Sun Bowl. Both Gesser and Wazzu would raise their game further the next year, winning 10 games, reaching the Rose Bowl and finishing in the AP top 10 for the second of three straight seasons. (The third season would take place without Price, who left for an ill-fated stint at Alabama.)
2007 Notre Dame
Head coach: Charlie Weis (third year)
Change in record: from 10-3 to 3-9
Change in SP+ ranking: from 26th to 87th
What happened: Congratulations to Notre Dame, the only team to show up on this list twice.
Following an impeccable 19-4 start as Irish head coach, Charlie Weis’ second season finished in disappointing fashion with blowout losses against both No. 3 USC and No. 4 LSU. Notre Dame lost eight offensive starters, including quarterback Brady Quinn (who was replaced by true freshman Jimmy Clausen), and Weis replaced defensive coordinator Rick Minter with Corwin Brown. The result: a historic collapse.
Like 2024 FSU, Notre Dame began the season 1-9, a run that included the Irish’s first loss to Navy since 1963. Notre Dame lost to three ranked opponents by a combined 96-24, and late-season wins over dire Duke and Stanford teams only redeemed things so much. They would improve in the following seasons, but only to 7-6 and 6-6, and Weis was dumped at the end of 2009.
The Fighting Irish’s next good season: 2012. Brian Kelly replaced Weis and went 8-5 in each of his first two seasons before an experienced squad, led by a strong offensive line and all-world linebacker Manti Te’o, went 12-0 in the regular season and reached the BCS championship game. It was the first of four top-10 seasons for Kelly in South Bend.
2021 Northwestern
Head coach: Pat Fitzgerald (16th year)
Change in record: from 7-2 to 3-9
Change in SP+ ranking: from 31st to 101st
What happened: Like Mike Price, Pat Fitzgerald succeeded in cycles. Between 2011 and 2019, Northwestern combined four losing records with four seasons of nine or more wins, and they likely would have won nine or more with a full season’s work in the COVID-abbreviated 2020 season too. They went 6-1 and qualified for the Big Ten championship game, where they led Ohio State late in the third quarter before succumbing 22-10. A Citrus Bowl win capped the school’s first top-10 finish in 25 years.
In 2021, however, the Wildcats entered the season with the nation’s lowest returning production. It showed. The defense went from great to decent, and the offense went from below average to horrendous. NU would go just 4-20 over the next two seasons, then Fitzgerald was fired for off-field reasons.
The Wildcats’ next good season: 2023. It didn’t turn out to be a sustainable recipe — Northwestern is right back to 4-6 this season with only a 5% chance of winning out to reach bowl eligibility, per SP+ — but under interim coach David Braun, the Wildcats went 6-2 in one-score finishes to reach 8-5 overall. That’s not as good as Fitzgerald’s best years, but it was still a seven-win improvement over the previous season.
2021 Indiana
Head coach: Tom Allen (fifth year)
Change in record: from 6-2 to 2-10
Change in SP+ ranking: from 18th to 94th
What happened: After an 8-5 campaign in 2019, their best season in 26 years, Tom Allen’s Hoosiers took another step forward in 2020, going 6-1 in the COVID-abbreviated regular season, losing only a tight game against unbeaten Ohio State and technically earning a spot in the Big Ten championship game before an emergency rule change left them out.
Michael Penix Jr. was brilliant until tearing his ACL in the sixth game, and the Hoosiers finished the season with a bowl loss against Ole Miss. Penix returned in 2021, but he was rusty and inconsistent, and he suffered another season-ending injury in early October. After a 2-2 start, Indiana lost eight straight games. Allen could never right the ship, going just 7-17 in 2022-23, his last two seasons in charge.
The Hoosiers’ next good season: 2024. A coaching change (to Curt Cignetti) and a roster flip have completely reversed IU’s fortunes. The Hoosiers are 10-0 for the first time; they are a modern turnaround story in terms of just how much you can change in a short amount of time. (The changes aren’t guaranteed to work — just ask 2024 Florida State — but there are new opportunities on the table now.)
Obviously an exercise like this is more anecdotal than scientific. Both collapses and rebounds are potentially easier, for better or worse, in an era with greater roster flexibility and potential turnover, and just because it took Hayden Fry a while to get SMU going again in the 1960s doesn’t necessarily mean much for Mike Norvell.
Still, from the old “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” perspective, it is perhaps noteworthy that of the 10 teams above, only one rebounded immediately (1986 Boston College), but six had bounced back within three years, including six of the seven most recent examples. Only four of those six rapid rebounds happened with the same coach in charge, and each of the two examples from this decade turned around immediately with a new coach. Even Louisville, which crumbled so thoroughly to the ground in Bobby Petrino’s final season, bounced straight back to 8-5 the next season under Scott Satterfield.
Florida State probably isn’t going to be this horrendously awful for long, in other words. It was almost impossible for this to happen once — this genuinely is one of the greatest collapses this very old sport has ever seen — and it probably won’t happen again. But the odds of a full rebound under Norvell aren’t great either. He will bring new assistants and, most likely, another large transfer class to Tallahassee in 2025, but the collapse exposed a level of fragility within the program that might eventually require a head-coaching change to completely fix.
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Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
On the penultimate day of the regular season, the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates met on a cloudy afternoon at Yankee Stadium for a game of little consequence. The Yankees had already clinched the American League East title. The last-place Pirates were 24 hours from another long offseason.
But the game featured an intriguing matchup within the matchup: two starting pitchers with vastly different backgrounds and histories who happened to be leading contenders for the Rookie of the Year Award in their respective leagues to the mound opposite each other.
For the Pirates: Paul Skenes, the hyped generational talent 14 months removed from college. For the Yankees: Luis Gil, a 26-year-old revelation two-plus years removed from Tommy John surgery.
Nearly two months after that meeting, the two right-handers were recognized Monday as the best rookies in their leagues. Skenes was voted the National League’s Rookie of the Year, beating out a loaded field headlined by outfielders Jackson Merrill and Jackson Chourio after posting one of the best rookie seasons for a pitcher in major league history. Gil edged out teammate and catcher Austin Wells and Baltimore Orioles outfielder Colton Cowser to win the award in the American League in a tight race.
Skenes, who debuted less than a year after being selected with the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft, surpassed expectations in his first taste of the big leagues to become the second Rookie of the Year award winner in Pirates history (Jason Bay, 2004) with 23 of the 30 first-place votes. With the honor, he earned a full year of service time despite not being called up to the majors until May, making him eligible for free agency after the 2029 season.
“Our goal, first and foremost, was to make all my starts,” said Skenes, a former two-way star at Air Force who became a full-time pitcher his junior season at LSU in 2023. “And then, beyond that, it was basically to see the best version of me that I can be out there. So I felt very good about that this year. Stayed healthy and felt really good the entire year. And then the results, I think, speak for themselves.”
Skenes, 22, went 11-3 with a 1.96 ERA in 23 starts across 133 innings. His 1.96 ERA was the lowest for any rookie with at least 20 starts in the live ball era, dating to 1920, and the lowest in baseball in 2024 among pitchers with at least 130 innings pitched. His 0.95 WHIP was tied for best in the National League. His 170 strikeouts were a franchise rookie record. His 4.3 fWAR ranked 10th among major league pitchers. With the performance, he was selected one of the three finalists for the NL Cy Young Award along with veterans Chris Sale and Zack Wheeler. That winner will be announced Wednesday.
On Monday, Merrill finished second with the other seven first-place votes and Chourio in third. Merrill, a shortstop in the minors through last season, was the San Diego Padres‘ starting center fielder on Opening Day at just 20 years old. He excelled in all facets, finishing the season with a .292/.326/.500 slash line, 24 home runs, 90 RBIs and 16 steals in 156 games while playing above-average defense. His 5.3 fWAR led all rookies.
Chourio, who doesn’t turn 21 until March, signed an $82 million extension last offseason before making his major league debut and, after a slow start, lived up to the investment. Chourio went on a tear after carrying a .201 batting average and .575 OPS through June 1, batting .305 with 16 home runs and an .888 OPS over his final 97 games.
In the American League, Gil tallied 15 of the 30 first-place votes, narrowly topping Cowser, who finished with 13 first-place votes and five points behind Gil. Oakland A’s closer Mason Miller and Cleveland Guardians reliever Cade Smith each earned one first-place vote. The five-point differential marks the second-closest election in an AL Rookie of the Year race since the three-player ballot was introduced in 2003.
“I was focused on having a good year, on helping the team win as much as I could and being focused on my career,” Gil said.
Gil entered spring training an afterthought in the Yankees’ plan, slated to start the season in the minors after being sent to minor league camp in early March. The Yankees had their starting rotation set. Gil had electric stuff but command was a concern and he logged only four innings in A-ball in 2023 after undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2022. Then Gerrit Cole, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, was shut down because of an elbow injury shortly thereafter, opening a spot for Gil. He did not relinquish it.
Gil went 15-7 with a 3.50 ERA in 29 starts. He led all AL rookies in wins, innings pitched (151⅔) and strikeouts (171). His 1.82 ERA through 12 starts helped the Yankees navigate the club’s 2½ months without Cole to start the season and solidified his place in the rotation for the remainder of the season. He gave up one or fewer hits in five outings, tied for the most by a rookie since the mound was moved to 60 feet, six inches in 1893, according to ESPN Research. He didn’t giver up an earned run in six of his starts, the most by a Yankees rookie since 1913.
Signed by the Minnesota Twins out of the Dominican Republic in 2015 and traded to the Yankees three years later, Gil is the 10th Yankees player to win the honor. He is the first Yankee to win it since Aaron Judge in 2017 and the first Yankees pitcher since Dave Righetti in 1981. He is the fifth Dominican-born player to win the award.
“He worked so hard to put himself in a strong position heading into spring training after coming back from Tommy John surgery,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said in a statement. “Without a guarantee of a major-league spot, he absolutely kicked in the door this spring and went on to have a phenomenal rookie season. Luis continued to mature and develop all year and was one of the pillars of our rotation.”
Unlike Gil, there was little doubt Skenes was a major league-caliber pitcher out of spring training, but the Pirates chose to not include him on their Opening Day roster. The rationale was simple: Skenes logged just 6⅔ innings as a pro in 2023 after he accumulated 122⅔ innings for LSU. So Skenes was sent to Triple-A for more seasoning and dominated on a limited workload. In seven starts, Skenes posted a 0.99 ERA with 45 strikeouts across 27⅓ innings.
Finally, on May 11, Skenes made his major league debut against the Chicago Cubs. He gave up three runs with seven strikeouts over four innings. He would give up three or more earned runs only twice more over his final 22 starts.
His first 11 outings were so dominant (1.90 ERA, 89 strikeouts to 13 walks in 66⅓ innings and seven no-hit innings in his final start of the first half against the Milwaukee Brewers) that he was named the starting pitcher for the NL All-Star team, setting the stage for an electric first inning in Arlington, Texas, against four of the sport’s best hitters. Skenes, the fifth rookie to ever start the exhibition, threw 16 pitches to Steven Kwan, Gunnar Henderson, Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. He walked Soto in an otherwise clean inning. He touched 100 mph and showcased his splinker — a splitter-sinker hybrid. The sequence, like every one of his starts, was must-watch television.
He pitched into the ninth inning for the first time as a pro in his first start after the All-Star Game, taking a hard-luck 2-1 loss against the St. Louis Cardinals after giving up a run in the ninth. But Pittsburgh, despite adding players at the trade deadline, fell out of the wild-card race down the stretch.
The Pirates, cautious to not overwork Skenes, had him pitch on extra rest — either five or six days — in all of his starts. But he logged at least six innings in 16 of his 23 starts. He threw at least 100 pitches in nine of them. He closed his season strong, giving up only two runs in five September starts. His final outing was brief but spectacular: Two perfect innings at Yankee Stadium, one of the sport’s grandest stages, opposite one of his most talented peers.
The goal next year? To pitch deeper into games more often from Opening Day.
“I think just being able to stay out there for seven or eight innings rather than five or six innings every outing, that’s going to be the biggest thing,” Skenes said. “We’re starting with the end in mind. We’re going to figure out how to do that.”
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