The Baltimore Orioles have been exceeding expectations this season, and an improved offense is one of the reasons why. Second from the bottom in runs scored last year, the Birds went into yesterday’s off day tied with the Chicago White Sox for seventh-most in the American League. While improved pitching and defense has arguably had a bigger impact, plating more runners has greatly benefitted the team’s fortunes.

Ryan Fuller has played a key role in the offensive uptick. A former University of Connecticut infielder who joined the Orioles organization as a minor league hitting coordinator in 2019, Fuller was promoted to big league co-hitting coach, along with Matt Borgschulte, last November.

In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Fuller discussed the club’s new school meets old school philosophy — and some of the notable players who embrace it — when Baltimore visited Boston earlier this season.

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David Laurila: What is your approach — the Orioles approach — to hitting?

Ryan Fuller: “Organizationally, what we believe in starts with making great swing decisions, swinging at the right pitches in the zone, and taking pitches that aren’t in the zone. If we do that, hard contact is going to come. And if we make hard contact, OPS, scoring runs — whatever metric you want to look at — is going to heighten. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, the Orioles beat the Mariners, turning an early 7–0 lead into a 9–2 win. In the annals of history, a last-place team beating a fourth-place team in a midseason game won’t exactly be one that old baseball historians recount in future documentaries. But it did cause the O’s to cross a symbolic threshold, guaranteeing that they’d have their first winning calendar month since 2017 (counting a 2–1 March 2019 would be a scurrilous case of loopholery). That’s not exactly cause to break out a Melchizedek of the bubbly stuff, but it’s progress for a team whose rebuilding efforts seemed to be lacking that characteristic.

One thing that bedeviled the Orioles was how little of a boost they received at the start of the rebuilding process. Mike Elias may have been hired after the 2018 season to oversee the reconstruction, but it was the old brain trust who got the ball rolling with major trades, dealing away Manny Machado, Zack Britton, Kevin Gausman, Jonathan Schoop, and Darren O’Day and receiving 15 players in return. Until this season, it looked like the only one that would make any impact on the team’s future would be Dillon Tate, picked up from the Yankees in the Britton trade, who has made his home as a mid-tier reliever. You can make an argument that the best minor leaguer involved in an Orioles trade during the first year of the rebuild was a player who was traded from Charm City, not acquired, when the O’s sent minor league veteran Mike Yastrzemski to the Giants.

The lost 2020 minor league season was problematic for everyone on the planet, but in a pure baseball context, I’ve argued that it was especially so for a Baltimore team flooded with Triple-A tweener pitchers and not enough places to play them. Fast-forward to our second season of relative normalcy, and you start to see a real foundation start to come together. We were generally bullish around here about Baltimore’s farm system coming into the season; my colleagues Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein rated the team very highly, and ZiPS had the team with the best prospect in baseball both at catcher and on the mound. ZiPS is even more positive about the team’s future now as most of the top prospects have improved their stock, some massively, rather than see it slide. Let’s run down some of the projection changes since the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Lyles plays for a Baltimore Orioles team that stands 34-39 and is currently projected to finish 72-90. For the 31-year-old right-hander, that qualifies as more of the same. Lyles is in his 12th big-league season, and not once has he played a full year with a team that finished above .500. Moreover, he’s been on four clubs that lost 100-plus games. The worst of the worst was the 2013 Houston Astros, who went 51-111, a staggering 45 games out of first place.

The three seasons in which he’s played for multiple teams haven’t been much better. In each of those years, one of the two clubs he took the mound for ended up losing over 90 games. To date, Lyles has never pitched in the postseason.

That he never anticipated such a dearth of winning would be stating the obvious. Selected 38th-overall in 2008 out of a South Carolina high school, Lyles entered pro ball with the same lofty hopes and dreams as his draft-class peers. When you’re young and talented, visions of championship glory come with the territory.

He did reach the big leagues in relatively short order. Seventeen when he signed, Lyles was a precocious 20 years old when he debuted with the Astros in 2011. His first outing was a harbinger of things to come. The fresh-faced youngster allowed just a pair of runs over seven innings, only to see the bullpen blow the lead, depriving him of a win. At season’s end, Lyles was 2-7, the team 56-106. Read the rest of this entry »

What is your favorite baseball memory? I posed that question to 10 major league players, and in nearly every instance, the response began with a question of their own: “Does it have to be from my own career?” While all were happy to share one (or more) meaningful memory from their time in the big leagues, it was primarily magic moments from their days as fans and/or young amateurs that stood out the most.

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Jackie Bradley Jr., Boston Red Sox

“I have two. Being able to have all of my family members at the All-Star game with me in San Diego in 2016 is one. The other is having my family with me in London, England for the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry series [in 2019]. They were all with me for the [2018] World Series as well, so there are actually three: All-Star Game, World Series, and being able to travel all the way to London, halfway around the world, to watch me play. In no particular order, those would be my favorite baseball memories.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Bradish has a promising future in Baltimore. The 25-year-old rookie right-hander has a 6.86 ERA and a 6.06 FIP over his first 42 big league innings, but he’s also got plus stuff and improving command. Acquired from the Angels in the December 2019 Dylan Bundy deal — Los Angeles had taken him in the fourth round of the previous year’s draft out of New Mexico State University — Bradish came into the current campaign ranked seventh on our Orioles Top Prospects list.

Bradish discussed his developmental path, and the M.O. he takes with him to the mound, when Baltimore visited Fenway Park in late May.

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David Laurila: What do you know about pitching now that you didn’t when you entered pro ball?

Kyle Bradish: “A lot of it is the analytics, which we didn’t have to the same extent when I was in college. I’m getting adjusted to that, learning about things like spin efficiency and all that stuff.”

Laurila: How much of it is impacting what you’re doing on the mound? Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin will have periodic minor league roundup post that run during the week. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

Before we get to this post’s analysis, some housekeeping. I’m continuing to trudge through the last few team lists, and hope readers will understand that part of why this has taken so long is because a) we lost multiple writers to teams during the process and b) it takes a lot for me to compromise my vision for the depth and quality of my work. I’m on pace to finish just before the draft while also updating and expanding the draft prospect list so that draftees can quickly be added to their club’s pro list right after they’re picked. I realize that continuing this way during future cycles would leave valuable and relevant info unpublished for too long, and that I need to make changes. For instance, I don’t have a Cardinals list out yet while guys like Andre Pallante, Brendan Donovan and Juan Yepez are all playing big league roles. I’ve had well-formed thoughts on that group of guys since they were part of last year’s Arizona Fall League, and need to find a way to shorten the lag between when I’m taking those notes and when they’re turned into actionable info on the site, especially when it comes to short-term big leaguers.

My approach for in-season updates (which have already underway — duh, you are reading this post) will again be to group teams based on the geographic location of their spring training facility (for example, teams with East Valley facilities in Arizona are already being updated) and drill down deepest on contending clubs (within that East Valley cluster, the Giants) as they’re more likely to part with prospects ahead of the trade deadline. There will still be à la carte updates where I see a player and add them, or where someone’s performance prompts me to source info from scouting and front office contacts and brings about a change in their evaluation or valuation. Read the rest of this entry »

Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.

His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.

I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.

“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”

The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin will have periodic minor league roundup post that run during the week. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

I noticed what felt like an unusually high number of rehabbing big leaguers (and some prospects) in the box scores over the last several days, so I called around to get info on how these pitchers have looked on their way back from injury.

The Rays have two prominent members of their pitching staff currently working back through the minors: former top prospect Luis Patiño and current top prospect Shane Baz. Patiño, who was put on the IL on April 12 with an oblique strain, has only just begun his climb through the minors. He threw one inning in the Florida Complex League on Monday night and sat 94–96 mph with his sliders in their usual 84–87 range. He threw just one changeup. Baz, who is coming off of arthroscopic surgery of his right elbow, has been rehabbing at Triple-A since the end of May, working on four days rest and ramping up to about 80 pitches in his most recent outing, in which he struck out 10 hitters in 4.1 innings on Sunday. He looks like his usual self, sitting 94–97 and touching 99, and is poised to rejoin the Rays’ rotation within the next week.

(Another Rays note: former first rounder Nick Bitsko, who is coming off of a prolonged rehab from labrum surgery, was sitting 92–95 during his Extended Spring outings and has moved up into the 40+ FV tier now that he’s shown his arm strength is mostly back to pre-surgery form.)

Also set to return to a big league rotation is Nationals righty Stephen Strasburg, who has made three rehab starts with Triple-A Rochester, also on four days rest, recovering from thoracic outlet surgery. While he’s still showing plus secondary stuff, especially his changeup, his velocity has been way down, hovering in the 88–92 range with poor shape. Of all the pitchers who I’ll cover today, he’s the only one who hasn’t looked anything like himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Fuller taught high school English in Higganum, Connecticut for four years before becoming the hitting coach of the Baltimore Orioles. An infielder at the University of Connecticut before spending a year in the Arizona Diamondbacks system, the 32-year-old Fuller went on to earn a Master’s degree in Education from the University of New Haven. Books, and the lessons they provide, remain a big part of his life.

Asked about his favorites to teach, Fuller began with Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“That was a big one for me in 10th-grade honors,” said Fuller, who has tutored hitters at different levels for over a decade. “From a morality standpoint, there are so many things that I connect with. Kids love reading the book and being able to tie it in with what it means to be a good person. They think about other people — about walking in their shoes, as Atticus put it —and the values and morals are still the same today.”

Fuller cited Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” as other books he’s seen impact specific age groups in particular ways. The lessons are analogous to his current job.

“It’s kind of the same thing we’re doing with our hitters,” explained Fuller, who is well-schooled in hitting analytics. “We’re taking sometimes complex, abstract things that maybe the hitters aren’t really grasping, and turning them into something tangible. They’ll say, ‘Oh, man, that makes sense.” That’s what I enjoy most about being a teacher.” Read the rest of this entry »

On April 15 at Camden Yards, the Orioles and Yankees were locked in a stalemate. Both starters had exited, and by the seventh inning, the score remained tied, 1–1. It would be up to each team’s bullpen to keep the game close until their respective bats came alive. The Yankees, of course, sported the league’s finest collection of relievers, a sentiment shared by our preseason positional power rankings. The Orioles bullpen, in contrast, had been deemed one of the league’s worst. A lack of offensive firepower also cast a shadow of doubt on Baltimore’s hopes for victory. It was clear: One side had the advantage, the other did not.

And yet, it was the Orioles who triumphed to secure the win. The projected 28th-best bullpen held its own until the 11th inning, when Ramón Urías drew a walk-off walk against a shaky Aroldis Chapman, bringing a drawn-out conflict to a close. But this isn’t just a one-time, David-beats-Goliath story. As of this writing, the Orioles have the most valuable bullpen in baseball by WAR (I know, it’s early for that, but bear with me). They have the second-most effective bullpen by xFIP. And to really put things into perspective, here’s a comparison between the Orioles and the Yankees:

As expected, the Yankees bullpen has served the team well. But on most fronts, the Orioles’ own unit has kept pace, a fact we can appreciate regardless of how the team is performing. Sure, that’s more mirage than reality. Skeptics can point to an abnormally low home run rate and the fact that it’s early – the Orioles had yet to face a revitalized Mike Trout until Sunday, for example. Consider, though, that Orioles relievers not only own the league’s fifth-highest groundball rate, but also its lowest fly ball rate. In tandem with the altered dimensions of Camden Yards, there’s reason to believe this contact suppression isn’t merely a fluke. They’ve set themselves up for success, in other words. Read the rest of this entry »