Cade Povich’s best start for the Baltimore Orioles in 2024 came right after Labor Day.
The 6-foot-3, 185-pound left-hander from Bellevue, Neb., was going through an up-and-down few months since he had been called up on June 6, including a two-week demotion in late July. But on Sept. 3, Povich showed the stuff that made him a promising young arm for the future.
When manager Brandon Hyde took the ball from the 24-year-old with one out in the eighth inning of a blowout win against the Chicago White Sox, Povich had thrown a 98-pitch gem en route to his second win of the season. Using a five-pitch mix (four-seam fastball, curveball, sweeper, changeup and sinker), he set career highs in innings (7.1), strikeouts (10), strike percentage (71.4) and called strikes (25).
By year’s end, Povich’s record (3-9) and ERA (5.20) had somewhat obscured the bright spots. Across 16 starts, he was highly successful at times, and at others less so. After being sent down to Triple-A Norfolk on July 13, Povich watched tape of his starts to find ways to improve. His cutter, one of his best pitches in the minors, wasn’t as effective against big league hitters. He ditched the cutter in his final eight major league starts, instead leaning on his fastball and sweeper more.
“From the first half [when] I was up to the second half when I came back up, I did a lot of looking at myself in a way, and also kind of the usages and mentality of different things,” Povich said. “I think toward that last month, once I kind of found myself and stayed consistent with the things that I was doing, we found better results.”
That figure-it-out mentality could prove vital in the future for Baltimore, which acquired him in a trade from the Minnesota Twins in 2022 and needed him to fill in at the big league level in 2024 after a wave of injuries hit the starting rotation.
Povich’s willingness to adapt, paired with the confidence to not blow up his entire approach because of a few bad starts, has been with him since his days at Bellevue West High School where head coach Jason Shockey watched the lefty transform from a diminutive 5-foot-7 southpaw to a dominant pitcher standing at 6-foot-2 by the time he graduated.
“What I always thought about with Cade was that, I don’t care what level he’s going to go to, he’s going to be successful in part because he is going to figure it out,” Shockey said. “What I told a lot of college coaches was you need to put the [radar] gun away and just watch him pitch.”
“Learn How To Pitch”
From the time he could hold a bat, Cade Povich never put it down. That naturally led him to serve as his dad’s batboy.
Tim Povich had seen players like his son during his three decades as a baseball coach. Slight of build, Cade learned to mix his pitches and find ways to hold and pick off runners. He also showed a tenacity on the mound that belied his small frame, which earned Cade the nickname “Bulldog” from his dad.
“As a kid, he was always about strikes. He never threw the ball hard. In high school, he topped out at maybe 83, and that was maybe five pitches total his senior year,” the elder Povich said. “We stressed it nonstop. You need to learn how to pitch and maybe one day the velocity will catch up. We had no idea it would happen the way it happened, but that’s kind of been my philosophy.”
Cade Povich’s bulldog attitude was on display during the 2018 Nebraska State Legion tournament in Omaha. Then a senior, Povich was in a jam in the bottom of the sixth inning of a 2-0 game against Gretna High School.
Needing his best pitch, the lefty hurled a fastball past a Gretna batter to strand runners on second and third on his way to a five-hit, seven-strikeout complete game shutout. Povich recalled going home and watching the highlights on repeat.
“He punched a guy out and I mean, you could feel the energy in the stands and the dugout,” Shockey said. “And just kind of looking at him, just that look on his face like, I am not here to mess around.”
Despite his abilities, few college coaches saw promise in the left-hander. So, he headed to Phoenix, Ariz., to play for Todd Eastin at South Mountain Community College, which has produced other major league talent like Chris Duffy and Cody Ransom. There he thrived, finishing 10-1 in his lone season in 2019. His performance caught the eye of some big-time Division I programs, including Nebraska.
“You Better Answer That”
For more than a decade, it was a Povich family tradition to spend Father’s Day in Omaha during the College World Series. For a baseball family, it was only natural to head to the ballpark.
In the summer following his stint at South Mountain, Cade Povich was in the stands with his parents at Charles Schwab Field when he got a call from an unknown number with a Texas area code. Thanks to his connections from his years in coaching, Tim Povich had heard Will Bolt, an assistant coach at Texas A&M, was in line to take over at Nebraska.
“You better answer that,” Tim recalled telling his son. Forty minutes later, Cade returned with the news that Bolt wanted him to visit campus the following day.
“It’s kind of interesting how it happened on Father’s Day, we’re at College World Series,” Tim said. “The next day we went down on a visit and went to lunch after and Cade’s like, ‘That’s where I want to go.'”
Bolt had first noticed Cade Povich’s name as he checked junior college stats while at Texas A&M. By season’s end, Povich, armed with a 1.58 ERA, had crept to the top of the leaderboards. Bolt had planned to go see him pitch in the summer before landing the Nebraska job.
“We kind of looked at our roster and thought we need some starting pitching,” Bolt said. “Povich was our first phone call at Nebraska. … We kind of knew we were in a position where we weren’t really going to have the luxury of waiting around if we wanted him because I figured he had already started garnering attention from some big schools. And doing some research, he was a Husker at heart.”
At Nebraska, Povich’s development took time. The 2020 season was shortened to 15 games because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the lefty continued to work on his body and watch endless film. His fastball touched the high 80s as he grew into his 6-foot-3 frame, Bolt said, but he would often hit a wall after four innings, giving up too many home runs.
“Going into summer ball, continuing to work in the weight room and understand that, ‘Hey, if I really want to be a starting pitcher, I can’t hit a wall,'” Bolt said. “You could really, really tell his junior year his stuff started to tick up, and he kept growing and kept getting stronger. That’s when I started to tell people in our circle that this guy’s going to pitch in the big leagues for a long time.”
The 2021 season saw the Big Ten-winning Cornhuskers play in an empty stadium until after they had locked up the conference title. In the final series of the regular season against Michigan, the Big Ten lifted the ban on fans, allowing a crowd of more than 5,000 at Haymarket Park to witness Povich’s penultimate home start, a seven-inning gem that began with an immaculate first inning in which he struck out all three Wolverines on nine pitches.
“He came out that first inning and I elbow my wife, ‘I think he just threw an immaculate inning,'” Tim Povich said. “Next thing you know, my phone blew apart.”
The Next Step
In September 2024, Povich started five games (2-2) and logged a 2.60 ERA across 27.2 innings, allowing just eight earned runs for the Orioles. He capped the year pitching shutout ball into the sixth against the Twins — the team that drafted him in 2021 — to wrap up the top AL wild-card spot, though he did not appear in either of the Orioles’ postseason games.
Those final starts gave Povich some much-needed confidence heading into the offseason. As he prepares for the 2025 season, Povich has been in Bellevue splitting time between wedding planning (he marries his fiancée Sophia at the end of December) and training.
Povich, who turns 25 in April, is hoping to build on starts like the White Sox gem and those September outings and offer even more quality starts to a team with World Series aspirations. Along the way, he’ll be tinkering, self-evaluating and, of course, watching film.
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox
Issue 290: December 2024 / January 2025
Originally published Dec. 18, 2024