After going from 115 loses in 2018 to one of the greatest teams in baseball with one of the best farm systems in just five years, the Baltimore Orioles are a prime example of a rebuild gone right. With 101 victories, the O’s took home the American League East title in 2018. Young All-Stars Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Jordan Westburg are just a few of the players that have come through their farm system. The next generation, Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo, were just promoted to the major leagues. Baltimore has served as a model for other current rebuilding teams, especially when it comes to developing young hitters.
Finding the precise definition of that blueprint is the issue. Although many hypotheses exist, the Orioles have not disclosed their secret recipe, even if some of their tenets are not particularly novel. Some are merely hard to implement, like the 65 new appointments the Mike Elias administration made in around 18 months, when the team promoted hard work environments and streamlined messaging from minor league coaches to foster more competition through a whole organizational culture transformation.
“We have some organizational non-negotiable philosophies or values, and what we needed to do was find and hire a bunch of people that either believed in those or were willing to push those and build off those and that’s what we initially did,” said Matt Blood, who was promoted this winter from director of player development to vice president of player development and domestic scouting. “We drafted players that sort of fit in those moments as well. So we were acquiring players with these skills and we were finding coaches and building resources to reinforce these skills and then putting them to work.”
Gunnar Henderson was one of four Orioles hitters who made the All-Star team. (Nick Cammett / Getty Images)
Blood disagrees, despite anecdotal data suggesting many of the Orioles young hitters are proficient in similar areas.
“I think they’re just all good at adjustability,” he said, “and being able to compete against what the game is throwing at them.”
Nevertheless, as other clubs attempt to replicate the Orioles’ success by figuring out what they do well, some intriguing suggestions are circulating the league.
“They draft for VBA,” said a rival scout about the Orioles.
The concept that the Orioles have discovered an alphabet soup that outperforms other clubs’ statistics and have utilized those numbers to identify the best hitters in baseball is intriguing.
So what is VBA?
The bat’s angle with regard to the ground, measured straight behind or in front of the hitter, is known as the vertical bat angle. While swing-and-miss in some areas of the zone may be affected, a “steeper” bat bath is typically linked to the ability to lift the ball more effectively. To put it another way, being steep down in the zone is fantastic, but it can be challenging to stay steep and still hit a ball at the top of the zone.
This visualization of Vertical Bat Angle is from an explainer article by Eric Cressey. (Photo illustration courtesy of Eric Cressey)
So, how good are the Orioles at this? Are their swing paths good? Both yes and no.
According to @SwingGraphs, the Orioles rank in the center of the major league pack in terms of VBA. However, the major league team still features players who play diverse positions in their current lineup in addition to some holdovers from prior administrations. In terms of their “path score,” which takes into account VBA, @SwingGraphs discovered that Baltimore’s top three prospects—Holliday, Mayo, and Heston Kjerstad—were ranked second in the minor leagues when compared to other elite position-player prospects. The Orioles’ minor league players had the second-highest launch angle in the league, which is associated with having good VBA, according to an analyst for another organization.
Still, focusing on just one statistic in the scouting and development circles is most likely not a novel approach. Some evidence of this may be found in the Orioles’ ability to smash pitches in both the top and lower thirds of the strike zone.Though the Minnesota Twins’ offense is close, the Orioles are the only team in MLB that ranks in the top five for slugging in both the top and bottom thirds of the zone. The Red Sox have a strong slugging % in the top of the zone, but they also whiff a lot more than the Orioles, who do not whiff nearly as much. Additionally, the Orioles have the third-smallest disparity between their top and bottom slugging percentages. They are all good.
Multiple sources stated that they do not necessarily draft for VBA or appreciate it explicitly. Flexibility? That is a tale unto itself. Their multifaceted offense was recently demonstrated. Other team executives were more creative in their explanations of how the Orioles have produced bats that can slug all over the zone.
“They draft guys with present power and improve their launch angle and swing decisions,” said a rival assistant general manager with player development responsibilities. “That present power is there in the form of top-end exit velocities, not necessarily slugging percentage. They teach better Vertical Bat Angle to reduce ground-ball rates. Swing decisions plus better VBA equals power production when those top-end exit velocities exist.”
We are making progress now. You can produce some extremely good hitters if you take their raw power, give them better bat path choices, and enhance their swing decisions. How do they add all of it, too? How do they develop their young, undeveloped hitters?
“They have a lot of young coaches and throw short box with them — so those are relatively live arms, from up close, forcing the hitters to adapt and see the ball out of a release point,” said a rival director of player development. “They use weighted bats at most levels as part of the regular process to keep bat speed up. They focus on making good swing decisions and help hitters internalize that as they come up through the minors.”
This begins to align with values that even the Orioles will acknowledge.
“Our training environments are very competitive, very difficult,” said Blood. “That leads to more efficiency, in terms of learning skills.”
The short box meets their goal of giving their hitters a challenging and game-like practice. Those youthful instructors actually competed with one another to provide the greatest material for their brief box sessions, transforming their understanding of pitch shapes into nasty mound work.The nightly swing choice text messages assist emphasize that they want their hitters to only swing at pitches they can drive. It makes natural that they support data-driven methods that have been demonstrated to yield positive on-field outcomes, such as weighted bat training. Additionally, they use force plates, which are instruments that gauge a player’s force applied to the ground and have been linked to bat speed by Driveline Baseball, to assess their
Just these instances provide us with a glimpse into the tech- and data-driven process that goes into creating the modern Oriole slugger. However, other organizations are familiar with these ideas. Why, therefore, is it currently functioning so exceptionally effectively for the Orioles? The players themselves are frequently the topic of conversation.
“I think the Orioles have done a phenomenal job of getting guys with really good makeup,” Adley Rutschman told Travis Sawchick at The Score. “And once you get enough guys who are of that same mindset, because everyone is pushing each other and everyone is on the same page, it would be really difficult if guys were not bought in. When guys are bought in, it’s a lot of fun.”
A rival hitting coach concurred, saying, “Every single one of their All-Stars has a great baseball IQ.” “Everyone is going to succeed that night in their own special manner. Due to their high IQ, they are able to judge the pitcher’s strategy for them on any given day and modify their swing path and approach accordingly. I am going to swing my swing more scoopily today because he is throwing sinkers! I am going to be flatter today because he had a lot of ride.
“Never has it been more important to have high IQ players like that.”
(Top photo of Jackson Holliday: Cole Burston / Getty Images)
