Only the top two minor league affiliates are playing regular season games at this point in the summer, so the Orioles brought their first four draft picks to Camden Yards yesterday – Ike Irish (19th overall), Caden Bodine (30th), Wehiwa Aloy (31st) and Slater de Brun (37th).
The group visited the clubhouse, weight room and other areas of the ballpark, took batting practice and watched the game from a suite. Smiles and waves accompanied their introductions to the crowd after the first inning.
Irish shared his early impressions of Camden Yards with the media while sitting in the dugout.
“The warehouse is pretty sick,” he said.
Maybe he can aim for it in a few years.
de Brun received a $4 million bonus to forgo his commitment to Vanderbilt, saying it was “extremely hard” to turn down the program and legendary coach Tim Corbin.
“Deciding factor was my dream is to be a big leaguer and I want to start that process as soon as possible and get up here as soon as possible,” he said, “and I felt like this was the best route to do that.”
One of de Brun’s favorite moments from today was seeing Adley Rutschman, who played catch with him last offseason at his high school in Bend, Oregon. Rutschman and Summitt assistant coach George Mendazona were teammates at Oregon State, which led to the meeting.
“I asked him about hitting immediately and spacing with the hands and he was super keen to just give me advice and stuff,” de Brun said. “So that was amazing.”
They stayed in touch via Instagram and met up again today.
“I just talked to him down in the weight room,” de Brun said. “He’s like a mentor to me. Super cool to me and I’m super grateful for that.”
Though he didn’t play in the Florida Complex League, de Brun worked out at the Sarasota complex and set a specific set of goals.
Most important to the 5-foot-10 outfielder is increasing his weight from 187 to around 200 pounds, mainly in his legs but without sacrificing speed. He doesn’t want to tighten his upper body.
“Want to be that speed/power combination,” he said, “so developing both of those traits more.”
And how does he plan to do it?
“It comes down to calories,” he said. “Looking at the menu, picking what has the most calories on it and eating that every day, three square meals.”
* Rookie Samuel Basallo caught Kyle Bradish for the first time last night, before his fly ball hit the left field line in the 11th inning for a crazy walk-off single.
Bradish allowed one run over seven innings, his longest appearance in three starts since his return from elbow reconstructive surgery.
“It’s great,” Bradish said. “He’s learning at the big league level. He’s really young, but he was great today. We had a good conversation before the outing. I know he does a lot of work with Robby (Chirinose) and our pitching department, but he’s been great back there.”
“It felt good,” Basallo said via interpreter Brandon Quinones. “I thought it went really well. I think we worked together last year during one of his rehab starts. But I thought he executed really well tonight. Pitches went exactly where he wanted them to go, so I thought he looked great.”
Bradish lowered his ERA to 2.65 after completing seven innings for the first time since May 26, 2024 in Chicago. He hasn’t allowed more than four hits in any game this season.
“I think all his pitches are really explosive,” Basallo said. “I think they all move differently. I don’t think that makes it easier as a catcher to catch, but I think it makes it more fun, because he has the ability to give the hitters so many different looks.”
* Rookie outfielder Dylan Beavers drew two more walks to become the second player in club history with 15 or more through his first 19 career games with a plate appearance.
* Glenn Gulliver drew 17 walks in 1982.
Tonight’s game airs on MASN and will mark the return of the Statcast broadcast from last season. Kevin Brown, former Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts and MLB.com’s Alex Fast will be in the booth.
The emphasis on analytics will be more pronounced than usual.
“What I like to do with a game like this is make people know that numbers aren’t inherently scary and the term ‘Statcast’ isn’t inherently scary, that we’re going to probably visually teach the game and talk about the game a little bit differently than a normal broadcast, but we’re just packaging the normal presentation of baseball for decades a little differently,” Brown said.
“Ben (McDonald) likes to talk about, ‘Mike Mussina would throw his fastball right down the middle and people would miss it and they couldn’t figure out why,’ and people would say, ‘Well, he has a lot of carry,’ and now we know that means high spin rate, now we know that means induced vertical break.’ So some things that seem new now, people have been talking about forever. And I hope that people will watch the broadcast and they will be open to things presented in a little different way that are the ways that players and coaches and front offices talk about the game. So really what we’re doing is getting a little closer to the way people talk about the modern game, while also hopefully having the same baseball conversation we have on a nightly basis.”
Young Pirates ace Paul Skenes brings his 1.98 ERA and 0.936 WHIP into the game, but the booth also can dissect his 7.0 WAR, 218 ERA+, 2.42 FIP and other data.
“I think it’s a good opportunity to just present and teach a little bit differently,” Brown said.
The look of the telecast won’t undergo major changes.
“We’re not gonna overhaul the whole show, it’s not gonna be like the ESPN shows that I do where we take up a third of the screen with a pitch predictor,” Brown said. “Those shows you are opting into, right? If you’re watching the Statcast show on ESPN II, it’s because you want to watch the Statcast show on ESPN II. This is still an Orioles broadcast, so I don’t want it to feel dramatically different to a typical Orioles broadcast. I just want it to be different in an interesting way without losing the core of what makes our show our show.
“We’re gonna have Alex Fast with us. Alex is a savant at knowing how to operate Baseball Savant and he’s great at digging into data. And if Jackson Holliday’s having a hot 10 days here, Alex is really good about digging into it and finding some numbers or some stance changes or some pitch sequencing stuff that can explain why Jackson’s doing that really well. And we’ve got B-Rob, who’s also really good at finding that stuff and can bring the perspective of, ‘Here’s what the swing looks like, here’s what I’m seeing as somebody who played 15 years.’ So I think that combination will be fun.
“And if it’s not, we will in ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ style throw Alex out of the booth.”
It probably won’t come to that.
“It’s worth noting how rare what MASN and the Orioles are doing is,” Fast said. “To this day, they’re the only team that has done a Statcast broadcast, and I think that speaks miles for how progressive they are.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the way front offices think. I think part of the fun of being a fan is trying to figure what GMs value. Do they want guys with a lot of ride on their fastball, guys who swing the bat hard, guys who have flat swings, or guys who simply have the best stuff? Statcast gives us insight into all of those things. It helps us gain insight into why the Orioles sign, draft or acquire the players that they do. It gives fans insights into why certain batters may hit where they do in the order or why they’re platooning.
“I am very empathetic to the fact that a lot of this stuff can come off as nerdy. I hear and acknowledge all of the ‘baseball is played on the field, not in a spreadsheet.’ What I want fans to understand is, the concepts we’re talking about have been around forever, we’re simply putting a name and number to them. Ted Williams talked about different swing planes back in the Science of Hitting in 1971. We merely use the best technology to verify that what he said was correct – and it was. Ben McDonald was talking about a fastball coming up on you a bit when he was pitching, but now we can describe that with rise and ride.
“Above all, what I really want and hope for this broadcast is that we create a space where this stuff isn’t alienating or boring, but instead exciting. I don’t want it to feel like a boardroom meeting, I want it to feel like you, the fan, are down on the field taking BP with Jackson Holliday, saying, ‘Hey, I see you’re out in front a bit more and it’s allowing you to hit more homers to the pull side. Why is that?’ That’s why I’m so excited to do this with B-Rob. There’s a difference between me saying, ‘His swing is flatter’ and a veteran with years of baseball experience saying it. He is such an important bridge between the fan and Statcast because he can indeed validate that this is the language of baseball both new and old.”
Roberts was known for his speed as a player and he had to keep up with the times as an analyst. He’s living in a different baseball world.
“It’s definitely evolved a lot in 10 years, 11 years,” he said. “We were getting some stuff, but not to the extent that we’re gonna go into (tonight), for sure. Have I had to do a crash course? Yeah, there’s definitely been a learning curve to some of this. And I don’t dive to the extent that Alex will, for sure. He goes down rabbit trails cause that’s what he gets paid to do. I get paid to talk about baseball games and to talk like a baseball player and then add some context to that.
“You remember when Koji Uehara came over and he’s throwing 88 mph heaters down the middle and people are swinging and missing, and you’re like, ‘Why is that happening.’ And now we have some context to probably why that would have been happening, right? Some of it would be obviously spin rate, carry, some of it would be tunneling, the ball coming out of the same arm slot but the split falling and the four-seamer staying on plane and stuff like that. And as a hitter it’s cool to see some of these bat metrics and these swing metrics.
“I think it’s neat. I hope fans will enjoy just seeing different things that inside-the-clubhouse people are looking or general managers are looking at, and that’s why people are signing guys and that might be why people aren’t signing guys.”
Roberts was drafted in the supplemental round in 1999 and made his debut two years later. He didn’t have the same data available to him. Certainly not to this degree.
“We didn’t know anything about an analytics department. If we had one, it was very behind the scenes,” he said.
“We weren’t getting this kind of information. Were we getting more information than when I came up in 2001? Yes, of course. By ’14 we were getting a lot more information. Were we getting anywhere near the information in 2014 that they’re getting in 2025? Of course not. So 10 years from now, Gunnar (Henderson) and these guys who started in 2022 are gonna be like, ‘Wow, we were in the dark ages in 2022.’ That’s just how it works.
“There’s no telling what’s coming 10 years from now.”