By Brittany Ghiroli and Eno Sarris / The Athletic
The Baltimore Orioles are a lesson in successful rebuilds, having gone from 115 losses in 2018 to one of the best teams in baseball — with one of the best farm systems — in five years.
The Orioles won the American League East last year, with 101 wins. Their farm system has produced young All-Stars like Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson and Jordan Westburg. Its next wave is on its way: Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo were recently promoted to the major leagues. Multiple rebuilding organizations have cited Baltimore as their blueprint, particularly in producing young hitters.
The problem is identifying what, exactly, that blueprint is. The Orioles are mum on their secret sauce, though some of their guiding principles are not necessarily groundbreaking. They are just difficult to execute, such as the 65 new hires general manager Mike Elias’ organization made in roughly 18 months as the franchise prioritized tough work environments to breed more competition through a culture shift.
“We have some organizational, nonnegotiable philosophies or values, and what we needed to do was find and hire a bunch of people that either believed in those or were willing to push those and build off those, and that’s what we initially did,” said Matt Blood, who was promoted this winter from director of player development to vice president for player development and domestic scouting.
While anecdotal evidence suggests many of the Orioles’ young hitters are good at the same things, Blood demurs.
“I think they’re just all good at adjustability,” he said, “and being able to compete against what the game is throwing at them.”
Still, there are some interesting theories around MLB as other teams try to figure out what the Orioles do well so they can follow the same road map.
“They draft for VBA,” or vertical bat angle, a rival scout said about the Orioles.
That is a compelling idea, that the Orioles have found something better than the analytics other teams use and that they have used those numbers to find the best hitters in baseball.
But what is VBA? Vertical bat angle is the angle of the bat respective to the ground, judged directly behind or in front of the batter. A “steeper” bat path is generally associated with the potential to lift the ball better. It is great to be steep low in the zone, but it is hard to maintain that steepness and still hit a ball at the top of the zone.
So are the Orioles great at this? Do they have good swing paths? Yes and no. SwingGraphs, which uses proprietary MLB swing path data, estimates that the Orioles are middle of the pack in vertical bat angle at the major league level. But the parent club still has holdovers from previous regimes, as well as players who fill different roles for their current lineup. In the minor leagues, Baltimore’s top three prospects — Holliday, Mayo and Heston Kjerstad — were second best in the league when compared with other top prospects in terms of their “path score,” which incorporates VBA.
Still, it is probably not a singular approach chasing one number in the scouting and development circles. Some evidence of this is how good the Orioles have been at slugging pitches in both the top and bottom thirds of the strike zone.
The Orioles are the only team that is in the top five of slugging in both the top and bottom thirds of the zone, though the Minnesota Twins’ offense is close. The Orioles also have the third-smallest difference between slugging at the top and slugging at the bottom. They are good all over.
Adjustability? That is a different story. Their offense is multidimensional. Executives from other teams had more theories on how the Orioles have developed bats that can slug all over the zone.
“They draft guys with present power and improve their launch angle and swing decisions,” said a rival assistant general manager. “That present power is there in the form of top-end exit velocities, not necessarily slugging percentage. They teach better vertical bat angle to reduce ground-ball rates. Swing decisions plus better VBA equals power production when those top-end exit velocities exist.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Take raw power, add swing decisions and improve their bat paths, and you start pumping out really good hitters? And how do they add all that? How do they improve their raw hitters?
“They have a lot of young coaches and throw short box with them — so those are relatively live arms, from up close, forcing the hitters to adapt and see the ball out of a release point,” said a rival director of player development. “They use weighted bats at most levels as part of the regular process to keep bat speed up. They focus on making good swing decisions and help hitters internalize that as they come up through the minors.”
This starts to line up with things that even the Orioles will admit they value.
“Our training environments are very competitive, very difficult,” Blood said. “That leads to more efficiency, in terms of learning skills.”
They want to make drill work difficult and gamelike for their hitters, so the short box fits that bill. In fact, those young coaches challenged each other to develop the best stuff for their short box sessions, turning their knowledge of pitch shapes into nastiness on the mound. They want their hitters to swing only at pitches they can drive. They believe in data-driven techniques that have been shown to produce results, so the weighted bat training makes sense.
These examples offer a window into the data- and tech-driven process of developing today’s Orioles slugger. But these are not concepts that are foreign to other organizations. So why is it working so particularly well for Baltimore right now? The talk often comes back to the players themselves.
“I think the Orioles have done a phenomenal job of getting guys with really good makeup,” Rutschman told The Score, a sports media platform based in Toronto. “And once you get enough guys who are of that same mindset, because everyone is pushing each other and everyone is on the same page, it would be really difficult if guys were not bought in. When guys are bought in, it’s a lot of fun.”
A rival hitting coach agreed.
“The high IQ allows them to know what the pitcher is trying to do to them that day and adjust their swing path and approach on a pitcher-to-pitcher level,” the coach said. He’s throwing sinkers, I’m going to be more scoopy with my swing today. He’s got a lot of ride, I’m going to be flatter today.
“Never has it been more important to have high-IQ players like that.”
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