The season isn’t over. There’s no reason to stop watching.
It’s silly that I have to say that, but in the era of the website formerly known as Twitter, some of us lack the nuance to capably have these conversations. The majority of us know that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Orioles’ season is not over just because closer Félix Bautista left their Aug. 25 win against the Rockies with an injury. I mean, they actually had the audacity to finish that game and then play two more after that already.
The thing is, there’s a whole lot of ground between “the season is over” and “the Orioles are obviously still winning the World Series.” But where exactly between those navigational beacons do the Orioles now find themselves? We have to be honest. It’s at least a little closer to the former.
(Before we go any further, yes, there is a presumption being made by myself and many others that “some degree” of a UCL injury won’t be followed up with better news anytime soon. While our inferences are reasonable given the history of UCL injuries, we do not know with certainty that Bautista’s season is over. It is possible that this column will prove silly come mid-September.)
In order to be able to discuss the team’s new reality, we’re forced to start by acknowledging just how important Bautista has been to this team. There is no reasonable debate that if the season ended today, he would be the team’s MVP. While Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson have higher fWAR totals on the season than Bautista, they’ve also played significantly more games. Henderson has a 3.1 fWAR in 119 games, suggesting he’s been good for a 0.026 fWAR per game. Rutschman’s 3.3 fWAR in 125 games puts him at 0.026. With Bautista having appeared in just 56 games, his 2.8 fWAR works out to 0.05 fWAR per game.
(You might point out that Kyle Gibson and Kyle Bradish have similar fWAR totals as Bautista while playing in fewer games, but I’d suggest you recalculate those numbers per inning and then report back to me.)
Bautista’s brilliance hasn’t just been relevant in comparison to other Orioles. His numbers are far more impressive when judged in comparison to history. If he’s thrown his last pitch this season, he will finish with the fifth-best single-season strikeouts-per-nine-innings rate ever (60-inning minimum). ESPN’s-far-from perfect Cy Young Predictor gives Bautista a score of 171.6, wildly ahead of his closest competition (Luis Castillo, 115.4).
To be clear, I do not think Bautista would have won the Cy Young Award. ESPN has needed to tweak their math for a few years to better reflect the actual priorities of voters. But even if we diminished the value the formula gives to pitcher wins and winning a division, Bautista would still have the lead (and a better argument than was being made nationally).
Callers on my 105.7 The Fan show Aug. 27 suggested the Orioles can find “someone else to get three outs.” And that’s perhaps true. But there isn’t going to be another Félix Bautista. No single player on this team has been as consistent from Opening Day until now.
Which speaks to the bigger issue regarding the Bautista injury. Not every team that makes a deep run in MLB playoff history has featured a closer pitching at the level that Bautista has this season. Former Oriole Koji Uehara was forced into the role of closer for the Red Sox in 2013 due to multiple injuries and helped lead them to a title. But that was a Boston team led by Jon Lester, Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz. Sean Doolittle had a rather mediocre season as the Nationals’ closer in 2019, but he was pitching behind the brilliance of prime Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg at the top of the rotation.
The 2023 Orioles are … remarkably imperfect. That’s sort of what we love about them. While their success is far from the absurdity of the 2012 team (and that impossible final +7 run differential), their +86 run differential is just the seventh-best in baseball, a little surprising for the team with the game’s second-best record. As FanGraphs’ Michael Baumann recently pointed out, it has been the bullpen that has allowed the Orioles to outperform their Pythagorean record. No one has made a bigger impact on that than Bautista.
This doesn’t mean the Orioles are otherwise a house of cards. The starting pitching has been more consistent (albeit imperfect still) in the second half of the season, and it is next to impossible to predict which players in the lineup will be hot at which time. It is not impossible to imagine that enough of the hitters stay hot (Ryan Mountcastle, Gunnar Henderson) or get hot (Cedric Mullins, Jordan Westburg) that the Orioles are an even greater offensive force in late September or October than they are now.
Yennier Cano has pitched well in August. Jacob Webb has largely been a revelation. DL Hall reminded us why his talent is so tantalizing in his first appearance of the season. And we can keep naming names like Tyler Wells and John Means and other variables and believe that we can ultimately solve for X. I can’t say definitively that we can’t.
But we can’t pretend this isn’t devastating either. A baseball team with next to no margin for error to begin with now somehow has even less. It’s … not ideal. Winning the World Series was an unreasonable goal to begin with but not definitively unattainable.
If they manage to overcome this to do it anyway, it might be the most remarkable story in baseball history.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox