With October’s arrival, suddenly everyone has a case of pennant fever in Baltimore. The next several days, we are going to find out if the 101-win Baltimore Orioles really have the goods or if they are just short on possessing the maturity and full-throttle hunger that championship teams are built upon.
I say the next several days, because that’s how long this five-game divisional series against the Texas Rangers will take to complete.
While championship baseball hasn’t been played here in 40 seasons and the intervening four decades have seen a good bit of bad baseball, my memory still remembers the teams that played great baseball from 1966-1983, those really special teams in ’96 and ’97, as well as Buck Showalter’s boys from 2012-2016.
One thing that really stands out about all those teams (not quite as much from 2012-2016) was that they all had No. 1 starters. In some cases, they even had multiple aces.
The first championship team in ’66 had Dave McNally, Steve Barber, Wally Bunker and 19-year-old James Alvin Palmer. The Orioles later added to Palmer and McNally with Mike Cuellar, who was as great of a No. 3 starter as any team has ever had. And that troika of starters — all aces — led the team to three straight World Series from 1969-1971.
In 1996, when Pat Gillick came in and was allowed to use Peter Angelos’ mighty checkbook to create a great group of free-agent talent like Roberto Alomar, Eric Davis and B.J. Surhoff. But that club also had the second-best starting pitcher in club history in Mike Mussina. Sure, Scott Erickson and Jimmy Key were a big help, but it was No. 35 who could put a team on his strong right arm and keep it from going into a tailspin of longer than three or four games — or just winning that one game you had to have.
The Orioles then went on a trip to the baseball desert from 1998-2011, but they would have never fallen into that degree of disrepair if they had kept Mussina beyond the 2000 season. An ace starter can keep a fair team interesting and not let it fall into the 100-loss territory.
Buck’s Boys in 2012-2016 had a very solid No. 2 starter in Chris Tillman. Dan Duquette brought in a talented pitcher from Asia in Wei-Yin Chen. Duquette and Showalter worked their magic, and a team devoid of an ace managed to win more games than any other team in the American League across a five-year period. While 2014 gave us a peek into watching important October baseball, it was flawed in many respects. An ace starting pitcher might have been able to get the Orioles deeper into a postseason run.
That brings us to 2023, a season shot out of a cannon if I have ever seen one. We have seen so much growth from the young veterans such as Cedric Mullins, Anthony Santander, Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle. A versatile interloper named Ryan O’Hearn has truly been a blessing. And then there are the Nos. 1 and 2 picks from 2019 draft, Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, who have captivated this town the way Frank and Brooks did, or Eddie and Cal.
But what I love about this team — even with the best closer in baseball out due to a late-season UCL tear — is that in Kyle Bradish, the Orioles have their first true ace since Mussina was allowed to leave after 2000. The 6-foot-3, 215-pound right-hander has been the club’s best starter since the middle of the 2022 season and will get the ball in Game 1 against the Rangers on Oct. 7.
Just how good is Bradish? I always play a game of tossing out one or two rogue bad performances to better paint the picture of just how dominant a pitcher has been.
Take out the game Bradish threw against the Rays back on Sept. 14 in which he allowed four earned runs in seven innings — a decent but unspectacular and a clearly less-than-quality start — and here is what Bradish has done in 50.2 innings since his Aug. 6 start against the Mets: 29 hits, 16 walks, 61 strikeouts, eight earned runs and one home run. That’s a 1.42 ERA and a 0.88 WHIP.
Hey, even if you throw back in that game against the Rays, that home run total only jumps by one, to two allowed in 57.2 innings.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Nobody knows how this series will play out. Well, maybe Jeremy Conn does. The Rangers possess a powerful and deep lineup that will be hard to hold down. But I do know this, in Games 1 and 5 — if the series goes that long — the Orioles might be the ones holding an ace. And that’s not a bad hand to have.
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox