American League Wild Card Preview: Baltimore Orioles vs. Kansas City Royals

If you look at the top of the American League leaderboards this year, you could be forgiven for treating baseball like it’s the NBA, where the best players all lead their teams to the playoffs. Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are on the same team, so of course that team is the AL’s top seed. Gunnar Henderson’s Orioles won a strong 90 games and took the top Wild Card spot. The next team down? Bobby Witt Jr.’s Royals, who notched 86 wins in a breakout performance that has Kansas City in the playoffs for the first time since winning the World Series in 2015.

That puts the clash between the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City Royals in stark lighting: Henderson’s superior supporting cast will hope to overcome Witt’s sheer brilliance. The stars shine brightly, and that’s just how baseball works in October.

That’s not how baseball works generally, though. Good players sometimes drag their teams to the playoffs, but those teams were almost always pretty good anyway. Sterling individual efforts still miss the postseason all the time. Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani teamed up for a half-decade and never made it to October. The Orioles and Royals are both far more than a frontman and his backup singers. The list of “everyone elses” in this series is full of players who are stars in their own right, and interesting stories abound.

There’s Adley Rutschman, who before the season felt about as likely to turn in an MVP-caliber campaign as Henderson. He’d chartered a meteoric course through his first two years, providing a corner outfielder’s bat with elite defense at the toughest position on the diamond. But he’s been worse across the board in 2024; he’s barely hitting better than league average, and his work behind the plate is at a career low as well.

Maybe it’s just fatigue – no catcher has made more plate appearances than Rutschman over the past two years — but he went from a 123 wRC+ at the All-Star Break to a 73 in the second half, and the underlying metrics are ugly. His barrel rate declined from 8.1% to 2.3%, and all the other contact quality metrics agreed. Still, there’s a sleeping giant here, ready to be awakened. Whether that will happen this postseason is open for debate.

Or take Cole Ragans, Kansas City’s game one starter. Fifteen months ago, he got traded for Aroldis Chapman straight up, a minor part of the Rangers’ trade deadline improvements as they chased the playoffs. Ragans has been one of the best starters in the game since the day he arrived in Kansas City. He took the ball 32 times and looks likely to finish in the top three for Cy Young in his first full season as a big league starter.

Is it a little weird that he went from roster afterthought to ace? Sure, but the underlying numbers back up his remarkable transformation. He’s missing bats at an elite level. He has three excellent pitches, plus two average ones to break out in case of emergency. Like Rutschman, though, the workload might be catching up to him. He’s been walking more opponents and striking out fewer of them in August and September; only a mid-.200s BABIP has kept his ERA from reflecting it. Maybe pitching on six days rest in Game 1 will help him recuperate – or maybe he’ll just be good enough to overcome fatigue and win anyway. Either way, this will be the biggest challenge of his career.

His Game 1 opponent, Corbin Burnes, already has a Cy Young win in his back pocket, and he’ll almost certainly finish in the top five this year as well. He’s a very different pitcher than he was back in 2021, when he struck out more than a third of opposing batters and led the league in everything except innings pitched. These days, he’s using his cutter to generate weak contact instead of miss bats. His two breaking balls, a hammer curve and tight slider, are still fearsome. He’s throwing as hard as ever. He’s more savvy veteran than young upstart now, but he still undoubtedly has the tools to turn in a dominant month and carry the Orioles rotation.

That’s exactly what the O’s hoped for when they traded for Burnes this spring. They wanted an ace to pair with their impressive collection of young hitters, so they broke with their prospect-hugging ways and sent Joey Ortiz and DL Hall to Milwaukee in exchange for Burnes. And he’s delivered, giving them a ton of starts, a top-10 innings load, and Cy Young-caliber results in those innings. This O’s team would feel a lot worse without Burnes; three of the five starters in their ideal rotation are on the IL at the moment, and the bullpen’s banged up too. Burnes is their best pitcher by a mile.

That’s not how things look in the other dugout. Ragans might be his team’s Game 1 starter, but Seth Lugo looks likely to beat him in award voting this year. Lugo toiled for years as a multi-inning reliever for the Mets before getting a shot as a starter last year in San Diego, at age 33. He parlayed success there into a $45 million contract and promptly put together his best year yet in Kansas City.

Lugo succeeds very differently than Ragans and Burnes. While seemingly every pitch those two throw is filthy, Lugo gets by with a kitchen-sink approach. He throws nine different pitches, so many that our pitch models have to lump things together for brevity, but we think only one or two are standouts. There’s the fastball, the sinker, the cutter, the curve, the slurve, the slider, the sweeper, the changeup, and the splitter, and while he doesn’t quite love all of them equally, he throws five of them at least 10% of the time. His best pitch is undoubtedly his curveball, a massive two-plane beast that he can command for a strike or bounce in the dirt. But Lugo’s not really a strikeout guy – he punched out fewer hitters than league average this year – he’s a command and contact quality guy, and this year’s superb results can be credited in equal parts to keeping the ball in the yard and limiting walks.

The Royals’ third starter, Michael Wacha, is like Lugo with the volume turned down 5%. He throws a ton of pitches, but his only plus offering is the changeup that made him famous back in his St. Louis days. He too had a great season in San Diego in 2023 and then signed a multi-year deal with the Royals (his was for slightly less money than Lugo’s). Wacha limits walks and keeps the ball in the yard, only not quite as well. His 3.35 ERA might slightly flatter his results this year, but make no mistake, he’s a solid pitcher, comfortably above average. The Orioles would love to have him, and he’s going to give the Royals a huge edge in the game he starts.

Overall, Kansas City has a meaningful edge on the pitching side. They’ll bring the better starter to the mound in all three games. Their bullpen isn’t quite the best in baseball, but it’s above average, with deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg leading the way and a pile of converted starters behind him. Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch IV, Michael Lorenzen — all of them can go multiple innings if necessary, and all of them have been fairly successful this year. Angel Zerpa and John Schreiber have been good too. Maybe this isn’t quite the 2014 and 2015 Royals ‘pen, but it’s no walking meltdown either.

Baltimore, on the other hand, released their Hall of Fame closer six days ago. His replacement is a Phillies castoff, Seranthony Domínguez, who’s below replacement level on the year and has a 5.33 FIP with the Orioles. Setup man Yennier Cano has seen his walk rate double since last year’s breakout performance, though I still think he’s Baltimore’s best reliever. Cionel Pérez is the only other guy the O’s seem to trust in high-leverage spots, and, uh, he’s striking out 19.3% of opponents while walking 11.8%. Late-inning leads are going to feel dicey without Félix Bautista to clean up the mess.

Luckily for the Orioles, they make up for Kansas City’s decided advantage on the pitching side with a wall of young hitting talent. The Royals are closer to a one-man show at the plate than any major league team has a right to be. They’ve racked up 20 position player WAR this year, and Witt has 10.4 of that. The ageless Salvador Perez is the only other Royals hitter to crack the two-win mark, and his backup Freddy Fermin is in third place. Six of their nine starters posted a wRC+ below 100 for them this year. Yuli Gurriel and Adam Frazier are everyday lineup fixtures right now. Vinnie Pasquantino has an outside chance of playing in this series, at least as a pinch-hitter, and he’d comfortably be the third-best player in the group even if he’s not back to 100%. Witt and Perez have some heavy lifting to do.

Meanwhile, Baltimore’s lineup looks like the output of a computer program designed to come up with young successful hitters. Henderson and Rutschman are undoubtedly the main attractions, but Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg were both exceptional this year. Cowser might win AL Rookie of the Year; Westburg’s breakout campaign was interrupted by a broken hand, but he’s back and batting at the top of one of the best lineups in baseball. Jackson Holliday and Heston Kjerstad, two of the top prospects in baseball, can’t even crack the starting nine.

Even outside of the youth movement, the O’s have some boppers. Anthony Santander hit 44 homers and posted a 129 wRC+, the best full-season mark of his career. Ryan O’Hearn crushes righties. Cedric Mullins is more platoon bat than All-Star these days, but he’s a valuable rotation player and an excellent defender. Ryan Mountcastle delivers Pasquantino-esque offense at first base, but he’s something like the seventh-best hitter in Baltimore’s everyday lineup, not the third-best. Heck, the O’s even have a lefty masher, Austin Slater, to plug in against Ragans.

Playing in Baltimore provides the O’s another edge. Their best hitters are largely either lefties or switch-hitters. The Royals’ best guys are all right-handed, with the possible exception of Pasquantino. Camden Yards is the third-worst park in baseball for righty power, but the ninth-best for lefties. That left-field cutout produces some strange looking outs and “wait, how was that not a homer?” moments. The Royals are far more likely than the Orioles to fall prey to it.

Finally, I suppose I should say a few words about the two superstars who give this article its framing device. Witt has been absolutely incredible this year. He’s hitting like Yordan Alvarez – and I mean that literally, they’ve produced the same wRC+ this year, with similar underlying numbers too. He’s doing it while playing shortstop, and a fairly good shortstop at that. I don’t quite think he’s the best defender at the position (more on this next week), but he’s improved markedly and has a flair for the spectacular. He also happens to be the fastest player in the majors. If it weren’t for Judge going all Barry Bonds on everyone, he’d be a shoo-in for AL MVP.

Henderson’s offense is a cut below Witt’s, but it’s still outstanding. He finished the year ninth in wRC+, sandwiched between MVP candidates Marcell Ozuna and Ketel Marte. He played more than those guys, at a harder position, and while he’s not quite Witt defensively, he’s an average defensive shortstop who hits like a great DH. Oh yeah, and he’s probably just as good of a baserunner as Witt despite possessing less raw speed. He makes great decisions, rarely gets caught, and swiped 20 bags this year.

In this year’s Trade Value Series, Henderson and Witt finished first and second. They’re the bright young faces of baseball, attached to their current teams for a long time and playing at an MVP-level already. They’ll hopefully be playoff fixtures for years to come. But their squads got here in very different ways: phenomenal starting pitching in Kansas City, and endless waves of preppy young hitters with names like Adley and Jackson for the O’s. My prediction: O’s in two, and a fun rivalry for future playoff runs.