Tony-OH

You are not going to win too many games when DJ Stewart is your clean up hitter. The Orioles may have one of the worse 4-9 hitters in baseball history with this lineup.

Not really. It was a really good AB and then he hit the ball hard just right at someone.

This is actually very good AB by Mountcastle here.

That's the way to start off a rally!

Is there anyone in this bullpen right now that you would feel good about in this situation?

Good Lord Valdez has no feel for his changeup today. We're going to need an attem ball.

Wow, two close calls..

Lloyd appears to be the only unsigned player from this draft. Since he doesn't turn 21 until August, I wonder if he thinks sticking around for his senior season will help him get more money. The Orioles could give him up to $189,900 without going over their cap. As a college reliver, I'm not sure he's going to find more money next year, but I guess we'll see how it shakes out. He has one week to decide.

Getting this back on subject, by my calculations, the Orioles did not spend just $64,400 of there allotted cap money. The only question is whether one of the 11-20 rounders outside of Craig got more than $125K since we have numbers in all picks 1-10. Overall it appeared Elias had a plan all along to get the guys he wanted with a mixture of overslot and underslots. When you come within 100K of your bonus allotment you did a pretty good job IMHO.

“He’s probably got the most power on the team, and that’s including Adley,” Britton said. “He’s long and lanky at the plate and the ball flies off his bat. We keep track of, like, exit velocities, balls over 95 [mph] and he’s exceeding everybody. Now, he doesn’t have as many balls in play here as some of our guys, but when this guy hits the ball, it comes off hot.” This confirms what I've been seeing. Stowers just consistently hits the ball hard, harder and more consistently than Rutschman though Rutschman has better overall plate discipline and less swing and miss. He also dedicated most of his training while home last year during the coronavirus pandemic to getting stronger once he wasn’t added to the roster for the Orioles’ alternate training site in the summer. He believes strength training is an area where there’s plenty of room to grow and improve, and values the tangible progress that can be made in such efforts. “Being able to drive the ball is something I’ve always been able to do, and I think with what we’ve been teaching here with swing decision and trying to get our A-swings off, that kind of fits perfectly into what I want to accomplish and helps me focused on getting the right pitches to drive and do what I think my ability best suits for,” Stowers said. A lot of what's being said here explains the added power and why I've liked what I've so much despite the high K rate. He really is becoming a top guy.

He does get long sometimes but part of it is he subscribes to the theory of "if you swing, swing hard in case you hit something." There is no statcast data available for minor leaguers unfortunately. Right now they get him swinging and missing with a good fastballs up and changeups but a lot of guys are swinging through good fastballs up, that's baseball now. He makes pretty good adjustments though and his swing decisions are pretty solid.

Hopefully they are just taking an abundance of caution with him and no big deal.

Yes, I noticed that as well, but in 2018 and 2019 he actually hit lefties better than righties, so it could just be a small sample size issue. He hasn't looked overwhelmed by lefties so I'm still hopeful he can hang with them that would enable him to be full time guy.

Jump to conclusions much? I said it's questionable that he can stay back there because I got a little bit of a long arm action when throwing and he's overweight and unless he loses weight, he may end up not being able to move like a MLB catcher needs to be able to move. That doesn't mean he has little chance, just that it's questionable.

It is time to start talking about this guy. Listed at 6-5, 190, the announcer said last night that he's now 6-7, 270 and let me tell you, he looks every bit of the size. Bautista has the best arm in the organization for pure velocity hitting 100 and 101 pretty regularly and sitting 98+. He still doesn't always knows where its going, but he's throwing enough strikes now that he's really interesting. He offsets it with a nice slider and has even thrown a change on occasion. Is the walk rate too high still? Yes. Does he have command? Not really Can he throw 100 MPH? That would be a yes. He threw a ball up and in that knocked a hitter on his butt. He threw it so hard, the trainer had to come out to see if the batter was ok because I'm pretty sure his heart rate was going about 220 beats a minute. If I had to guess, the batter told the trainer and manager, "That ball sounded fast" All I know is that batting against a guy that big with that fastball and that wildness can not be a comfortable at bat. Bautista is 26 years old and will have to be protected on the 40-man this year because with this arm he will be taken. Honestly they probably should give him a feel for the major league ball and move him to AAA because right now he's basically just throwing balls by most AA hitters. He's held batters this season to a .105/.269/.184/.453 slash line and let me tell you, no one digs in against him.

Have yourself a game young man. Walks in his next at bat so what does he do? He steals 2nd and 3rd base!

Hit his second of the game in his second at bat of Litscher again. 2-for-2 with two two-run homers for the young man.

Yeah, that was a heck of a catch by their CFer.

I heard he's had a reoccurrence of the back problems while down in Sarasota and his return this year is questionable. Hopefully it's something he can get over without surgery and be back this year. Its bad timing because he was really looking like a potential 2B option sometime in 2022. That probably backs up now. The other thing is he had stress fractures early in his college career so hopefully it's not related to this. Back problems are not something that tend to get better with age.

I added somethin I saw as well that highlights this if you go back and reread my post.

Yesterday Rutschman has a really good game behind the plate, throwing out two runners and catching Brnovich's 10Ks in 5IP, the catching the wild Almengo for 2IP while throwing (95-98), shifting over to catching the big curve of left-hander Vespi and finishing off with Batista's 100 stuff. At one point Vespi threw 6 balls straight. Adley goes out and talks with his pitcher with Vespi first having his glove over his mouth, but Adley looked like he just wanted to calm everything down. Vespi dropped the glove, Adley said something that made Vespi smiled, then he glove/fist bumped him then went back behind the plate and Vespi threw three straight strikes to strike out the batter. I also love how he runs out to great his pitcher after an inning. He's such a plus-plus leader back there who shows his pitchers how much he's behind them.

I watched his start yesterday though the Bowie behind Homeplate and to the right look is not great overall, it does give you some perspective of stuff. He's been 90-92 most of this year and he gets a decent amount of whiff up in the zone despite the mediocre velocity. He works it well around the zone and has good command of the pitch. His slider/knuckle curve thing is his go to pitch and it was very much on for the most part yesterday. It has late, sharp bite and he's able to bury it under left-handers hands for whiff while also getting right-handers to chase. I didn't see a lot of change ups but he did throw a couple getting whiff once and few foul balls. I would have liked to see Rutschman call a bit more changeups but his slider/knuckle curve was so good yesterday I guess it was too hard to go away from. Overall it's hard not to like what we've seen so far. He has better command than Bradish but we need to see how he spins that major league ball before getting too excited. He may end up best of the pitchers we got from the Angels in the Bundy, especially since Bradish has a reliever vibe to me.

I changed it..

The national media haven't caught up to Neustrom yet. He really has grown on me this year, particularly his plate discipline and ability to tap into his raw power in games more often. He has a ways to go to catch up to Stowers' upside, but I like him a lot more this year overall and he's definitely on the prospect scene.