It has been suspected for weeks that the Orioles would start the season Thursday without two cornerstone members of the team’s youth movement, but the temporary absence of shortstop Gunnar Henderson and starting pitcher Grayson Rodriguez isn’t exactly the end of the world.
Until it is.
Henderson is expected back in a week and Rodriguez in a month, and if that’s all there is to Gunnar’s intercostal strain and Grayson’s sore elbow, this may turn out to be a minor inconvenience in the greater scheme of another long and potentially promising season.
Or it won’t.
Of course, my advice is to keep a good thought. There are, no doubt, some worried fans who will make “Waiting for Gunnar and Grayson” an existential exercise in fatalism and others who will channel the great philosopher Tom Petty and recognize that “The Waiting” is the hardest part.
In either case, we – and the O’s – have all been down this road before, wondering what would become of last year’s defending American League East champions after they opened the season without the league’s top closer and quickly lost three of their top four starters to major elbow surgery.
Turned out, the Orioles remained competitive in spite of those injuries and several other key losses to reach the playoffs and are expected to return to the postseason again this year in spite of a few spring setbacks. But that assumes that Gunnar joins the starting lineup by mid-April (or hopefully next weekend) and Grayson comes back in early May instead of mid-July.
Even in their absence – and with the offseason departure of pitching ace Corbin Burnes and slugger Anthony Santander – this is a formidable team with solid depth and an exciting group of high-ceiling young players.
The Orioles also have something that some fans forgot when they were assigning blame on social media for the club’s second consecutive poor performance in the postseason. They have one of the best crisis managers in the sport.
Brandon Hyde guided this team through a painful rebuilding period and led it to a respectable finish in 2022 before blowing the doors off the AL East with 101 wins the next season. He won The Sporting News American League Manager of the Year Award for both those seasons and won the BBWAA American League Manager of the Year Award in 2023 … and you could make a case for him winning one or both of those honors last year for getting 91 victories and another playoff berth out of that severely depleted pitching staff.
Meanwhile, executive VP/general manager Mike Elias proved that he could do a lot more than just make good draft choices. I realize that a lot of fans are disappointed that he didn’t land a $200 million starting pitcher to replace Burnes this past winter, but he did bring in solid No. 2 starter Zach Eflin at midseason last year and has filled some cracks in this rotation with veterans Charlie Morton and Kyle Gibson.
Yes, they are just a couple of major league senior citizens, but Elias clearly values the wisdom of the ageless. Gibson was a huge positive influence on the young O’s starters in 2023 and led the team with 15 victories. The Orioles also got a similar contribution from journeyman Jordan Lyles during the breakthrough 2022 season.
Who knows what Morton and Gibson will do this year, but if they buy the team time for Rodriguez to get back up to speed and Kyle Bradish and/or Tyler Wells to return at midseason they will be well worth their one-year deals.
And so it begins. The Orioles begin the regular season Thursday afternoon with the first of four games against the formidable Blue Jays in Toronto and come back to Baltimore for Opening Day on Monday against the much-improved Boston Red Sox.
Nothing like getting thrown right into the deep end of the pool.