Does Santander's possible departure increase need for veteran bats?

The final game of a baseball season, and especially in the playoffs, can resemble a high school graduation. You sit next to someone in homeroom for four years and realize you probably won’t ever see each other again.

Paths are more likely to cross in sports, but the Orioles know that their spring training clubhouse won’t look the same. Players will be signed, promoted or acquired in trades. Others will be dealt, released or lost in free agency.

Anthony Santander is a free agent who’s been in the organization since December 2016 and coming off a season with a career-high 44 home runs and 102 RBIs. His. 814 OPS is the highest in a non-pandemic season. He made his first All-Star team. He’s played in 152, 153 and 155 games the past three seasons.

National media suddenly is beginning to notice.

Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are the only players in the majors with more home runs. They know where they’ll be playing in 2025.

When a reporter said goodbye Wednesday night and mentioned the possibility of talking again next spring in Sarasota, Santander smiled and said, “I hope so.” He didn't have the usual grin with the twinkle in his eyes. He managed to appear sad.

At his post-Game 2 press conference, manager Brandon Hyde said, “We're very disappointed. I think especially when you lose like this, there's frustration, there's anger, there's disappointment because you felt like there were opportunities there in those couple games to change the score, and it didn't happen.”

There's also the melancholy. Guys want to stay together. They developed friendships that can last a lifetime, but they also want to remain teammates. It’s gonna cost the Orioles with Santander after paying him $11.7 million this year.

“You take away 44 homers, that's a big deal, especially how he stayed healthy all year, too,” Hyde said yesterday during his media session.

“He did an amazing job of … he's been battling. He's had that ankle and some other things that, I’ve had to rest him quite a bit, or I tried to try to manage his playing time with him much as I possibly could because I wanted him in the lineup. He played right field a ton this year and played it so well. So I was really impressed with how he could post, how he prepared, played defense. And then hit 44 homers for us with 100 RBIs. That's a heck of a year.

“I'm really happy for Anthony. It's somebody that we care deeply about, somebody that was in my first spring training in 2019 and saw him switch-hit right away. I had no idea who he was and it's been a fun ride with him.”

Hyde wasn’t asked about free agency and bidding on Santander, but everything that he said reinforced the outfielder’s importance to the franchise and the challenge of replacing him if necessary. And that was just between the lines.

“One of the few guys who has been here since that first spring training, that when our new group kind of came in in 2019 made an immediate impression, and he’s been a hero for us,” said executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias. “He’s one of the key figures in bringing this franchise back to relevance, playoff competitiveness, excitement, filling the ballpark. He’s been terrific. I love the guy, personally. I think everyone in that locker room does. But it’s Major League Baseball. We’ve got business coming up. There’s the time and the place for that, but it’s not here and now.”

The prospects accumulated from the draft, which led to No. 1 farm system rankings, generate much of the attention. There was a time during the rebuild that fans and people in the industry couldn’t talk about anything else. Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg played a full season, except for the infielder’s broken hand, of course. Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo and Connor Norby made their major league debuts among position players. Norby was traded to the Marlins at the deadline for starter Trevor Rogers.

If Santander is gone, there could be a greater emphasis over the winter in acquiring a veteran hitter rather than leaning harder on youth. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference in the Wild Card round. Maybe the Orioles wouldn’t have been held to one run. We won't know.

“We're gonna look into all that this offseason,” Hyde said. “We just ended yesterday. I think we'll start meeting, probably later today, and start evaluating and going through our roster. We talk about our roster every single day, but now it's the off-season and we're going to more deep-dive into how we feel like we can be better for next year.”

“We’ll see what we up doing,” Elias said, “but certainly not immune to that thought and we’ll be putting it into our processes as we talk the next couple of weeks.”

Hyde ventured back to his Cubs days to cite veteran Ben Zobrist as an example of the battle-tested hitter who “changed our entire lineup.”

“Thirty-six years old, switch-hit, hit the ball all over the place, walked,” Hyde said. “Joe (Maddon) hit him fourth around these young guys because there was gonna be an at-bat or two in the game where you knew Zo was going to take a great at-bat with runners in scoring position, and it changed our entire lineup.

“Those type of things, that's just experience and confidence of being in there in that moment. And a lot of times with our guys, you try to slow the game down for them, but it's tough in the batter's box in front of 45,000 people when the game's on the line or you're trying to get the big hit for your team. I think our guys are going to improve just from the experiences that they've had."

Co-hitting coaches Ryan Fuller and Matt Borgschulte have received praise for improvements made by certain players who labored in other organizations. Unlocking doors to bring out their best. Preaching proper swing decisions, attacking in the hot zone, making hard contact, getting lift. When the bats go cold, someone is bound to catch heat. That’s the nature of the business.

“Yeah, hitting coach is a tough job because you're never going to have 13 or whatever guys going at the same time,” Hyde said. “You're going to have three guys going, you're going to have three guys struggling, and you're going to have six guys kind of in between, and it changes every three or four days. So it's a really, really tough job.

“Hitting is so hard to do. I think our guys do an amazing job of preparing our guys. I think they're unbelievably likable. Guys love to hit with them in the cage. They're incredibly prepared, they're unbelievably positive, and they're living and dying with every single one of our guys’ at-bats. That's all you can ask for.”

Players talked all season about maintaining and trusting the process. The word should be spelled out on Adley Rutschman’s license plate. They didn’t want to deviate from the approach, though it sure seemed to be the case later in the season and especially against the Royals.

Major changes in the philosophy aren’t anticipated. The Orioles didn’t take it this far to bail now. But there could be some reflection during an offseason that wasn’t supposed to stretch this long.

“It’s obviously something we need to take care of,” Gunnar Henderson said of the offense. “We’ve also done really well hitting with runners in scoring position, so it’s something that, we just went up there and tried to battle and it just didn’t work out.”