Ryan O’Hearn crushed a home run in just his second career major league at-bat in 2018. He crossed home plate with a gaping smile and was full of jubilation in the dugout.
But that feeling didn’t last long.
His opportunities the next four seasons came with disappointment, and he finished the 2022 season with an uncertain future in Kansas City. O’Hearn’s struggles challenged him mentally, changing the person he was off the field. The smile he once had was a rare sight. That’s when his now wife Hannah had to intervene.
“My wife was like, ‘You suck. Not in baseball, but you suck to be around,'” O’Hearn said. “That’s when I kind of was like, ‘Oh yeah, I do. I’m not having fun on the field, I’m bringing it home.’ And then I had the realization I don’t want to look back and be like, ‘I hated my life during the only time that I played in Major League Baseball.'”
O’Hearn was traded to Baltimore for cash considerations in January 2023. He was designated for assignment shortly thereafter but cleared waivers and received an invitation to big league camp. He failed to make the Orioles’ 2023 Opening Day roster out of spring training, but he was called up to the majors 12 games into the season and has been a mainstay in Baltimore’s lineup ever since.
Interim manager Tony Mansolino referred to O’Hearn as having come back from the dead. O’Hearn, who turns 32 in July, has emerged as the Orioles’ top hitter in 2025 with a real shot at his first All-Star nod eight seasons into his big league career.
“When it’s been taken away from you before, you have a much different perspective,” O’Hearn said. “I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for every inch I’ve had in this game. I wasn’t a first-round pick. I was an eighth-round pick. I’ve been designated twice, been optioned countless times, all that. So it’s been a journey.”
The turnaround for O’Hearn began when he worked with the three hitting coaches on the Orioles’ 2023 staff: Cody Asche, Matt Borgschulte and Ryan Fuller. They helped O’Hearn improve his posture in the batter’s box. O’Hearn noted he has always been good at adjusting to pitches down in the zone but struggled with pitches up.
The results showed immediately. O’Hearn had career-best marks in batting average and hard-hit percentage and a career-low whiff percentage.
But O’Hearn still didn’t draw a lot of free passes. His 4.1 walk percentage was in the bottom 2 percent among all MLB players in 2023. He attributed that to being a bad forward mover, often jumping off his back side too early.
Former Royals major league coach John Mabry — now a senior adviser to the Orioles’ major league coaching staff — worked with O’Hearn while he was in Kansas City on his lower half. O’Hearn credited Mabry with helping trigger his breakthrough in Baltimore.
“I think when you’re a forward mover like I was for a lot of my career in Kansas City, the ball kind of speeds up on you,” O’Hearn said. “Can cause you to chase breaking balls trying to go get them instead of seeing the ball and making a decision when it comes at you.”
O’Hearn took a leap forward in 2024, clubbing a career-high 15 home runs with a walk rate that improved by more than 5 percentage points as his pitch tracking improved. He also significantly cut down on his strikeout rate.
O’Hearn is playing the best baseball of his career in 2025. The 6-foot-2, 220-pound designated hitter, first baseman and outfielder was hitting .307/.389/.482 with nine home runs entering play on June 13.
“He’s had time in the game, he’s lasted, he’s made it and he’s been allowed to make adjustments,” Mansolino said. “I think sometimes we expect players to come up right away and just be the absolute best versions of themselves right away. I don’t think that’s realistic.”
O’Hearn didn’t only need adjustments mechanically. His mental game needed arguably just as much work.
That’s where Dan Hennigan came into the picture. The founder of Brain & Barrel Hitting and now the director of hitting for the Houston Astros, Hennigan was a hitting analyst with the Minnesota Twins when he was introduced to O’Hearn following the 2022 season. O’Hearn’s agent Allan Donato knew Hennigan through another athlete he represented.
Hennigan believed O’Hearn had a good strategy at the dish, but the pair worked on understanding the ways pitchers attacked O’Hearn and how the ball came off his bat.
“I knew his movement pattern and the way his upper body joints allowed the barrel to release, I knew that could play,” Hennigan said. “It was sort of the direction with which he was having the barrel release and the positions he was putting his body in where he just couldn’t impact the ball to certain parts of the field consistently.”
Hennigan credited O’Hearn’s evolution from simply looking for a way to improve to “truly understanding” the work he was doing. Hennigan felt things change once O’Hearn understood what went into the impact between the bat and ball.
Through their work together, O’Hearn now knows what he’s hunting at the plate every time he steps into the box and can make corrections in the middle of at-bats.
“Dan is a wizard,” said O’Hearn, who has worked with Hennigan each of the past three offseasons. “He kind of helped me fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of hitting over the years. … He’s almost got his own language.”
O’Hearn said improvement is “a never-ending search.” His constant work and his long, winding path have created a mentality that allows him to remain at ease when he endures a difficult stretch.
O’Hearn said his path offers him good perspective. He no longer beats himself up, which wasn’t the case often in Kansas City.
“There were some times when I was doing the opposite of having fun,” O’Hearn said. “I hated coming to the field. I was miserable. But at the same time, I couldn’t let go of being a baseball player. And when I finally did that and realized, ‘OK, this might be the end of it,’ I wanted to look back and not think, ‘Wow I was pissed off the whole time I was in the big leagues.’ So that was a big change for me.”
Mansolino said O’Hearn’s path “makes the player.” And now that player could be on the verge of becoming a first-time All-Star. Should that potential become reality, it’ll be “a blessing” for O’Hearn.
“Ten-year-old me wouldn’t believe it,” he said.
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox
Originally published June 18, 2025