‘This team is on the rise’: Why Baltimore still has plenty to celebrate
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Tim Kurkjian, ESPN Senior Writer
ARLINGTON — The looks on the faces of those 46,000 Baltimore Orioles fans as they quietly exited Camden Yards on Sunday after a discouraging loss to the Rangers was not one of anger, but of sadness. The fans of Baltimore — a provincial town, a brick town, a neighborhood town — had waited almost a decade to celebrate the return of October baseball after such a painful rebuild. Instead, 11 walks later, a giant orange mass of people walked into the darkness in stunned silence.
The 11-8 loss — it was 9-2 in the third inning — dropped the Orioles into a 2-0 hole in the best-of-five American League Division Series against Texas, with the series heading to Arlington. And considering the magic with which the relentless Texas Rangers have been playing in this postseason, many of those fans sensed there would be no more baseball this season at Camden Yards.
They were right. The Orioles lost 7-1 in Game 3 on Tuesday, ending the season and marking the first time since star catcher Adley Rutschman debuted on May 21, 2022, that the Orioles had been swept in a series of any length. But yet when the season ended Tuesday night at Globe Life Field, the Orioles clubhouse was not in stunned silence. It was awash in the feeling that a still remarkable season just didn’t end as expected.
Did manager Brandon Hyde view it as a successful season?
“How can I not?” he said. “We won 101 games. We won the East. We defied the odds. No one gave us a chance. We played really well all season.”
And they did: Two years after finishing 39 games out of fourth place, the second team ever to finish that far behind the next-worst team in a league or division, the Orioles swiftly revitalized baseball in Baltimore with swashbuckling style of play: young, hungry and athletic players who pushed the action every night, on the bases, at the plate and on the mound. They had the best record in the American League two years after having the worst record, joining the 1967-69 Mets as the only two teams in major league history to win 100 games in the same three-year period in which they lost 100 games. The fans thought the momentum might carry the Orioles to the AL Championship Series, and maybe the World Series.
“It didn’t end the way that we wanted, but it was a special season,” said outfielder Austin Hays, who had endured a lot of losing before the Orioles broke through last year. “It was fun, it was the most fun I’ve ever seen a team have. That first playoff game at Camden Yards was amazing.”
But then they ran into a Rangers team that is more experienced in October, has a payroll nearly $150 million more than that of the Orioles and was playing exceptionally well at the most optimum time.
“We made great development all year,” rookie shortstop Gunnar Henderson said. “This was a good step in the right direction. This is going to fuel us for next season. We’ve got to get better to make a World Series push.”
Compared to many of the other 2023 postseason squads, the Orioles were just young and inexperienced for October, though Hyde refused to blame those attributes — “Our guys just play.” And despite another round of questions about whether the five days off between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the postseason are good or bad for a top seed, Hyde refused to blame that, either. To stay sharp, the Orioles played two intersquad games, one of which was open to the public — about 2,000 fans showed up.
Still, the Orioles looked young and rusty against the Rangers, nothing like the team that had a winning record every month of the season (other than 0-1 in October). The Orioles lost the opener 4-3 with their best pitcher, Kyle Bradish, against Andrew Heaney, who had thrown 15 innings in the past 32 days. Orioles pitchers struck out 16, allowing the Rangers to become only the second team in postseason history to win a nine-inning game in which they struck out 16 times. The Rangers were the first team in postseason history to have their No. 3 hitter (Robbie Grossman) and No. 4 hitter (Adolis Garcia) each strike out four times in the same game. But the Orioles didn’t get a hit with a runner in scoring position. Down a run in the eighth inning against a beleaguered bullpen, the Orioles had runners on first and second with none out — and didn’t score. They got the leadoff man on in each of the last three innings and didn’t score.
The Orioles’ ninth inning also brought confusion. Henderson singled to start the inning. On a 2-1 pitch to veteran outfielder Aaron Hicks, Henderson was thrown out trying to steal thanks in part to a great exchange and throw by Rangers catcher Jonah Heim. Hyde was caught on TV cameras saying, “What the f—!?” After the game, Hyde called it “a little miscommunication.” Henderson said, “I saw the steal sign.”
The next day, Hyde confirmed, “[Hicks] missed a hit-and-run sign on a hittable pitch.”
As badly as Game 1 ended, Game 2 started even worse. The Orioles’ Grayson Rodriguez, one of the best young pitchers in the game, didn’t get through the second inning, allowing four walks and five runs. The Rangers’ Mitch Garver hit a grand slam in the third inning and suddenly the Rangers had a 9-2 lead. The sellout crowd, which was so loud, so joyous when the playoffs began, was suddenly hushed. The Orioles would rally, but the final score, 11-8, was misleading. Baltimore pitchers walked 11 batters, one shy of the major league record for a postseason game.
In Game 3, another five-run second inning for the Rangers blew it open, essentially ending a magical season. The Orioles became the fourth team in history to fail to win a playoff game in a season in which they won 100 games, joining the 1971 A’s, ’76 Phillies, ’80 Yankees and 2019 Twins. It was indeed a deflating way to end a season, but the 2023 season cannot be viewed as a disappointment for the Orioles, not the way it would be for, say, the Dodgers or Braves, who entered the season with enormous expectations. It should be viewed as a building block, a learning experience, for a team that’s likely going to be in the postseason for years to come. In the last two years, the Orioles have gone ahead of schedule in their rebuild, jumping from 52 wins to 83 in 2022, then from 83 to 101 in 2023. It is so difficult to make a huge leap like last season’s — it’s harder to make another vault the next year.
The Orioles did both, and even now their future is exceptionally bright. Henderson, who will win the AL Rookie of the Year, “will be a star in this league for 15 years,” Hyde said. Rutschman is one of the best catchers in the game, and likely will only get better. Outfielder Heston Kjerstad, who was on the playoff roster, “can mash,” Hyde said. Outfielder Colton Cowser, third baseman Coby Mayor and infielder Joey Ortiz are among the many prospects in the system. The best player in all of minor league baseball is perhaps 19-year-old Jackson Holliday, who might be the Orioles’ everyday shortstop next year (moving Henderson to third base): Imagine that left side of the infield for the next five to 10 years.
Rodriguez, with tremendous stuff and great maturity, is a star in the making. Bradish has a 2.81 ERA over his past 38 starts, and this year became the first Oriole since Mike Mussina in 1992 to finish in the top three in ERA. John Means, the ace of the staff in 2021, pitched effectively at the end of the season after returning from Tommy John surgery. Next year, the bullpen will be without Felix Bautista, who had Tommy John surgery in August; losing him during a pennant race was a huge setback. Still, there are power arms in the pen. Left-hander DL Hall became a go-to arm out of the bullpen this season. And more pitching is on the way.
“This isn’t a fluke,” Hays said. “This team is on the rise.”
“This,” Henderson said, “is just a shadow of what we’re capable of.”
When next season arrives, the Orioles likely will be the team to beat in the AL East. They will still be young, hungry and athletic, but more experienced than the team that finished 2023. And when those fans arrive at Camden Yards on Opening Day 2024, they should be thrilled about the direction the team is headed. It will be a happy day, not a sad one.
The winner of the National League Championship Series could determine if Major League Baseball is played in 2027.
This might sound far-fetched. It is not. What looks like a best-of-seven baseball series, which starts Monday as the Milwaukee Brewers host the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1, will play out as a proxy of the coming labor war between MLB and the MLB Players Association.
Owners across the game want a salary cap — and if the Dodgers, with their record $500 million-plus payroll, win back-to-back World Series, it would only embolden the league’s push to regulate salaries. The Brewers, consistently a bottom-third payroll team, emerging triumphant would serve as the latest evidence that winners can germinate even in the game’s smallest markets and that the failures of other low-revenue teams have less to do with spending than execution.
The truth, of course, exists somewhere in between. But in between is not where the two parties stake out their negotiating positions in what many expect to be a brutal fight to determine the future of the game’s economics. And that is why whoever comes out victorious likely will be used as a cudgel when formal negotiations begin next spring for a collective bargaining agreement that expires Dec. 1, 2026.
If it’s the Dodgers, MLB owners — who already were vocal publicly and even more so privately about Los Angeles spending as much as the bottom six teams in payroll combined this year — will likely cry foul even louder. Already, MLB is expected to lock out players upon the agreement’s expiration. Back-to-back championships by the Dodgers could embolden MLB and add to a chorus of fans who see a cap as a panacea for the plague of big-money teams monopolizing championships over the past decade.
Such a scenario would not scare the union off its half-century-old anti-cap stance. The MLBPA has no intention of negotiating if a cap remains on the table, and considering MLB was on the cusp of losing games in 2022 because of a negotiation that didn’t include a cap, players already have spoken among themselves about how to weather missing time in 2027. Certainly, the Brewers winning wouldn’t ensure avoiding that, but if in any argument about the necessity of a cap, the union can counter that the juggernaut Dodgers lost to a team of self-proclaimed Average Joes with a payroll a quarter of the size, it reinforces the point that team-building acumen can exist regardless of financial might.
The Brewers have joined the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians as vanguards of low-revenue success in this decade. Over the past eight years, Milwaukee has won five NL Central titles and made the playoffs seven times. At 97-65 this year, the Brewers owned the best record in baseball. And they did so with a unique blend of players.
Of the 26 players on Milwaukee’s NLCS roster, 15 came via trade, according to ESPN Research, including a majority of its best players (slugger Christian Yelich, catcher William Contreras, ace Freddy Peralta and Trevor Megill, the closer for most of the season). The Brewers drafted four (Brice Turang, Jacob Misiorowski, Sal Frelick and Aaron Ashby, all major contributors), signed three as minor league free agents, brought in two via international amateur free agency (their best player, Jackson Chourio, and closer Abner Uribe) and snagged one in the minor league portion of the offseason Rule 5 draft.
That leaves one major league free agent. One. And it was left-hander Jose Quintana, who signed a one-year, $4 million deal in March.
Think about that: The MLBPA, which has fought for free agency since its inception, would be heralding a team that does not spend on free agents. Strange bedfellows, yes, but it strengthens the union’s position: If the current system is beyond repair because of money, how did a team that doesn’t spend win a championship?
The Dodgers, on the other hand, are not nearly as free-agent-heavy as might be assumed. They’ve acquired the most players via trade, too, though it’s only nine, and several of them — from Mookie Betts to Tyler Glasnow to Tommy Edman to Alex Vesia — play a significant role on the team. Los Angeles signed five major league free agents (including Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Blake Snell), plus two professional international free agents (Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Hyeseong Kim), two amateur international free agents (Roki Sasaki and Andy Pages) and two minor league free agents (Max Muncy and Justin Dean). They drafted five of their players — one more than the Brewers, whose development system is regarded as one of baseball’s best — and rounded out their roster with Jack Dreyer, an undrafted free agent.
Dreyer highlights what the Dodgers and Brewers do exceptionally well: extract talent from players through systems that value a combination of scouting, analytics and superior coaching. It doesn’t matter whether you spend half a billion dollars or the $115 million or so currently on the Brewers’ books. If you can become an organization that gets the best out of players, winning will follow.
Perhaps if they weren’t so terminally parked at opposite ends of the continuum, the league and union could agree that staking an argument around one playoff series is foolhardy. Both sides should understand that, in the grand scheme, a seven-game series says very little, particularly when it comes to the complicated economic system of 30 billion-dollar corporations competing in the same space.
But this battle is as much about narrative as it is reality, and if MLB is going to push for a salary cap, it needs as much evidence as possible, and the Dodgers becoming the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back World Series would provide another nugget on top of the reams the league already cites. The last team to do that was the New York Yankees — and the competitive-balance tax, the proto-cap that currently penalizes high-spending teams, came into existence specifically to check what other owners believed the Yankees’ runaway spending.
The Dodgers are the new Yankees, more moneyed and willing to spend than anyone. They’ve won the NL West 12 of the past 13 years and captured championships in 2020 and 2024. And despite their seeming inevitability, baseball is not suffering in most areas important to the league. Television ratings are up. Attendance has increased. The implementation of the pitch clock before the 2024 season modernized the game and is now almost universally beloved. The addition of an automated ball-strike challenge system next year will only add to the game’s appeal.
This NLCS is baseball at its best. A well-oiled machine of superstars, peaking at the right time, looking to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions since 2000, against a team that plays a delightful brand of baseball, is wildly likable and always seems to succeed, too. The Brewers haven’t won a championship yet — not just in this recent run of excellence but in their 57-year history — and derailing the Dodgers en route to doing so would make the tale of triumph that much greater.
And, yes, despite the higher win total, the Brewers enter this series as the underdog, and it’s a fair designation. Even if they swept the Dodgers in the six games they played in July. Even if their bullpen is filled with fireballing nastiness. Even if they have whacked as many home runs this postseason as Los Angeles, despite the Dodgers hitting 78 more during the regular season.
There will be a lot of great baseball played in Milwaukee and Los Angeles over the next week-plus, fans’ cups running over with the sorts of matchups that make October the most special month of the year. Ohtani, Betts and Freeman trying to catch up to Misiorowski’s fastball and read his slider. Chourio, Contreras and Turang trying to solve Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow and Ohtani. The Brewers’ terrifying bullpen, with five relievers throwing 97 mph-plus, against the team that hit high-octane fastballs better than anyone this year. The Dodgers trying to figure out if they can rely on any reliever other than Sasaki, and the Brewers, who were the fifth-toughest team to strike out this season, trying to get to Los Angeles’ bullpen with a barrage of balls in play.
While the baseball itself will be indisputable, this NLCS is bigger than the game. Its tentacles will reach into the future, with an unwitting but undeniable place in something far more consequential. It’s just one series, yes. But it’s so much more.
TORONTO — The Blue Jays‘ George Springer homered on the first pitch from Seattle‘s Bryce Miller in the American League Championship Series opener Sunday, moving past the New York Yankees‘ Derek Jeter into sole possession of fifth place on the career list with his 21st postseason home run.
Springer’s 385-foot drive to right field on a fastball at the outside corner put Toronto ahead with the first postseason leadoff home run in Blue Jays history. Springer has 63 leadoff homers in the regular season, second to Rickey Henderson’s record 81.
Manny Ramirez hit a record 29 postseason homers and is trailed by Jose Altuve (27), Kyle Schwarber (23) and Bernie Williams (22).
However, also in the first inning, Blue Jays outfielder Nathan Lukes fouled a ball off his right knee, falling in pain. He stayed in the game and drew a 12-pitch walk, then flied out leading off the third and was replaced by Myles Straw for the start of the fourth.
The team said he bruised his knee and was being further evaluated.
Lukes went 4-for-12 with five RBIs in Toronto’s division series win over the Yankees, including a key two-run single in the Game 4 clincher. He also made a diving catch in Toronto’s Game 1 win.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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