Orioles made it through rough terrain to plant feet in playoffs

MINNEAPOLIS – Orioles pitching coach Drew French says he “fancies himself” as an optimist. That’s just the way he’s built. He grabs the silver linings while hunting for gold. But limits are real, and the number of significant injuries and second-half losses could darken anyone’s sunny disposition.

The rotation was battered beyond recognition with Kyle Bradish, John Means and Tyler Wells undergoing elbow surgeries and Grayson Rodriguez twice landing on the injured list and being shut down in September. Reliever Danny Coulombe missed three months following his own elbow procedure and Jacob Webb was sidelined with elbow inflammation.

A pitch smashed into second baseman Jordan Westburg’s right hand and fractured it. Infielder Ramón Urías was the club’s hottest hitter until rolling his ankle a month later. Infielder Jorge Mateo won’t play until 2025 due to reconstructive elbow surgery.

It’s fair to question how much one man or one team can endure.

Could French honestly have envisioned a home Wild Card if told back in February that the Orioles would go through this kind of trauma?

Take him at his word.

“I would have said, ‘Yeah,’” he replied yesterday morning. “However, nobody likes to deal with it. But I think as you look around the league, especially pitching, it’s littered with injuries. It’s the unfortunate part of the job that you just know that you kind of have to expect it. That’s why depth is so important. You just kind of plug and play and guys have to learn on the job. Like (Cade) Povich has done and (Albert) Suárez has done this year.”

The Orioles didn’t repeat as American League East champions but they earned the No. 4 seed and regained their health beyond Rodriguez. They stumbled over some hurdles but regained their footing at the right time. Now they seem to be rolling.

“We had depth, for sure,” said first baseman Ryan O’Hearn. “We have a lot of good players, so that helps, and some guys have stepped up and carried us at times when guys were either not playing well or hurt. Urías comes to mind. He’s been really good down the stretch. (Emmanuel) Rivera has played well. I think that’s just part of a good team.

“You don’t want to lose guys and obviously we wish that everybody stayed healthy the whole time and we could have won the division or whatever, but that’s not the scenario we’re in and that doesn’t matter. Feel good with where we’re at.”

The rotation has posted a 3.77 ERA this season that’s the club’s lowest since 2014 (.361). There can’t be a better example of the Orioles’ resiliency, but they unravel a fairly long list.

“It’s been impressive what everyone did,” Coulombe said. “It’s really hard. People are thrust into positions that they maybe weren't quite ready for or whatever. Guys were able to play really well. It’s fun to see us starting to get healthy at the right time and I’m excited about how it’s gonna go.”

Corbin Burnes starts Game 1 Tuesday against the Royals, who counter with left-hander Cole Ragans. Burnes has been the rotation’s rock. You knew he’d be exceptional but he also needed to be durable. Lose him and the entire team might have crumbled.

There are limits.

“I think when you have somebody who’s consistently gonna go out there and give you a quality start for 95 percent of the year, you feel pretty good on the day that he’s gonna pitch,” French said. “What he’s brought to this team and this environment and the consistency and just the workmanship, he’s an elite human being and we’ve appreciated that about him.

“He’s an ace and that’s Game 1 and that’s where he fits. I know he’s gonna be ready and that’s the main thing.”

Burnes was made for these moments. Give him the ball on Opening Day, start him in Game 1. He isn’t fazed by any of it.

His nonchalance yesterday bordered on amusing.

“Normal routine, normal stuff,” he said. “Excited to get out there.”

Take him at his word.

Burnes faced the Tigers in back-to-back starts this month and shut them out over 14 innings, striking out 15 batters and earning his 14^th and 15^th victories to pad his career high total. They would have made a convenient opponent but did the unexpected yesterday and lost to the White Sox.

“It’s a lot less homework for me,” he said earlier in the day. “Seeing them so recently, I don’t do as many scouting reports and game plans.”

Now he’s got more studying to do. Burnes faced the Royals twice in April and allowed a combined five runs and 13 hits in 11 1/3 innings. Ragans tossed 6 1/3 shutout innings with one hit allowed on April 3 at Camden Yards but was rocked for seven runs and nine hits in 1 2/3 innings in Kansas City. The Orioles won four of six games.

The playoffs are a different animal, as the Orioles learned in the 2023 Division Series while getting swept by the Rangers. They’re home again for the Wild Card round. The joint will be rockin', but the Orioles can't let it all shake them.

“It’s perspective based,” French said. “It’s what you make of it, you know? Every seat’s gonna be filled and there’s gonna be towels and it’s gonna be crazy and there’s gonna be media presence, but it’s the same game that we’ve been playing since we got to camp in February.

“I think the main thing is we just continue to lean on the things that we do really well and continue to be the best version of ourselves as often as we can be and lean on the support of the guys in the bullpen coming in and picking each other up. The team baseball that we want to play, we want to continue to move that into October.”

“I think it’s important for guys to experience it,” said veteran catcher James McCann, who hit a three-run homer yesterday in a 6-2 win over the Twins. “It’s a different environment. The crowd is bigger. The crowd is louder. Each pitch, there seems like there’s more riding on it than a regular season game. So, I think that experience is huge and I think that it’s going to play out nicely for us.”

The Orioles haven’t named their Game 2 starter, which comes down to Zach Eflin or Dean Kremer. Eflin pitched in relief for the Phillies in four rounds of the 2022 playoffs and started for the Rays in last year’s Wild Card round. He hasn’t lectured teammates but is available for consultation.

“I think a lot of these guys got a good taste of it last year," he said. "They know what it takes, so we’re all gonna have fun, play hard and see how long we can go. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.”

If asked for his advice, Eflin would tell them to treat it like any other game, keep it really simple, block out the noise.

“It’s the same game we’ve always played since we were kids,” he said.

“The stage might be bigger and stuff, but at the end of the day, when you go out it’s all as real as it can be. It’s the pure game of baseball and that’s all it is.”

The sharpest contrast is the finality.  

“The atmosphere’s definitely different,” O’Hearn said, “and the game of baseball is interesting at this level because you play 162 games, so it’s like, if you lose it’s not the end of the world on the day-to-day basis. We’ll get them tomorrow kind of thing. But it kind of is the end of the world if you lose a few in a row now.”

“I think it’s more different for the first-time guys or your second time getting into it,” said Burnes, who’s pitched in eight playoff games. “There’s definitely a lot more adrenaline, there’s definitely a heightened environment. Once you know what to expect, you can kind of prepare for it a little bit and try to keep the adrenaline low as much as you can.

“It’s very easy to go out there and get fired up with the crowd and start spraying balls all over the place trying to do too much. Having been there many, many times, I kind of know what to expect and prepare as if it’s a normal start and go out there and have some fun.

“A lot tougher to win a postseason game. These guys will feel it. But momentum shifts are huge in the postseason. It could be a momentum shift in the second inning that changes the game, it could be the eighth inning. That’s something you don’t really get in a regular season game because they don’t mean near as much as a postseason game. It will be fun to get out there and see some of these guys in that environment.”

The Orioles are battle-tested and determined to keep playing. They didn’t withstand this much pain, physically and emotionally, to shut down again in the first round.

“I’ve said it for a long time in my career, you don’t learn a lot from success, you learn from failure,” McCann said, “and this team has had its share of failure, individuals have had their share of failure, and I think these guys have learned from it and have learned how to handle that adversity. And when you get to the postseason, there’s a lot of adversity. You’ve got to fight through things and I’m excited to see what this team has in store in October.”

“It’s just a resilient organization and a resilient group, staff included, and I think we just held the line and just continued to move forward,” French said. “As much as it was tough and it was emotional and you were kind of picking up the pieces, it was really awesome to see just kind of how everybody circled the wagons and kept going.”

There were stretches during the second half when the Orioles appeared to be circling the drain, nothing like their magical run the previous season when they posted the best record in the American League to secure the top seed. But it didn’t get them far.

“It seemed like last year everything was, aside from Félix (Bautista), pretty peachy. And then we were just kind of hit by a truck in the postseason,” O’Hearn said.

“I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Nobody does. I feel good with our group. Think we have a pretty resilient group of guys and we want to do something special together, so see what happens.”