One of the biggest storylines of the Orioles’ second-half swoon a year ago was the play of two-time All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman, who hit .189/.279/.280 in 290 plate appearances from June 29 on in 2024.
A foul tip hit his right hand on June 27 immediately prior to the stretch, which observers pointed to as a possible reason for the catcher’s decline in production. However, Rutschman has in 2025 more or less picked up where he left off in 2024, hitting .208/.299/.338 entering play on May 20.
Rutschman, 27, should in theory be in the middle of his prime. So is this a bad stretch or is this just who he is now?
“The way that I’m thinking about Adley Rutschman is sometimes we focus too hard on what they can’t do,” The Athletic baseball analyst Eno Sarris said on Glenn Clark Radio May 16. “You have to remember, [Rutschman is a] switch-hitting catcher who’s actually decent at the plate even if he’s not a star at the plate and he’s a good receiver and he’s a good framer. He’s a good player, so I don’t want to put everything on his shoulders. I think there’s still a chance he gets back to that premium upside, but even if this is the player he is, it’s not that bad.”
These discussions weren’t happening at this point last year. Rutschman put together a .268/.369/.439 slash line from 2022-2023. The 6-foot-2, 230-pound catcher then hit .300/.351/.479 with 15 home runs and 55 RBIs in his first 348 plate appearances of 2024, looking every bit like the power-hitting catcher the Orioles took with the No. 1 overall pick in 2019.
It’s been all downhill since then. Optimists look at Rutschman’s Baseball Savant page and see a hitter with solid strikeout-to-walk numbers who is getting unlucky on balls in play. Others see the same troubling trends as the past in terms of his average exit velocity, barrel rate, hard-hit rate and bat speed.
Regardless, Rutschman should almost certainly be seeing better results than he is.
“Adley Rutschman I would expect to be better over the second half, maybe over the rest of the season than he’s been so far if he just keeps doing exactly what he’s doing because he’s not getting the production you would expect to get out of how he’s hitting the ball,” Baseball America editor JJ Cooper said on GCR May 15. “… It’s really bizarre that he’s producing those kinds of batted-ball outcomes and still getting nothing out of it.”
Rutschman is a career .282/.366/.473 hitter as a DH, better production than when he’s been behind the plate. Some have suggested moving him off of catcher, but first base, for example, would put a lot of pressure on his bat considering the high threshold for production among first basemen — a threshold he hasn’t hit in some time now.
“I think the primary problem is if he’s hitting like this, he can’t really do anything but be a catcher, which makes it kind of awkward,” FanGraphs analyst Dan Szymborski said on GCR May 14. “It’s kind of what happened to Matt Wieters toward the end of his period of usefulness. If he was a catcher, if he can keep doing that, he’d be fine. You look at Rutschman’s projections — his wRC+, his OPS+, whatever you use — you can just see that go down, down, down a little. … It’s going to continue bleeding until something happens — and I do not know what that something is.”
For more from Sarris, listen to the full interview here:
For more from Cooper, listen to the full interview here:
For more from Szymborski, listen to the full interview here:
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