Facing Off: Henderson’s Orioles Take on Witt’s Royals in ALDS Showdown
Peter Aiken and Reggie Hildred-Imagn Images
If you look at the top of the American League leaderboards this year, you could be forgiven for treating baseball like it’s the NBA, where the best players all lead their teams to the playoffs. Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are on the same team, so of course that team is the AL’s top seed. Gunnar Henderson’s Orioles won a strong 90 games and took the top Wild Card spot. The next team down? Bobby Witt Jr.’s Royals, who notched 86 wins in a breakout performance that has Kansas City in the playoffs for the first time since winning the World Series in 2015. That puts the clash between the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City Royals in stark lighting: Henderson’s superior supporting cast will hope to overcome Witt’s sheer brilliance. The stars shine brightly, and that’s just how baseball works in October. That’s not how baseball works generally, though. Good players sometimes drag their teams to the playoffs, but those teams were almost always pretty good anyway. Sterling individual efforts still miss the postseason all the time.
Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani teamed up for a half-decade and never made it to October. The Orioles and Royals are both far more than a frontman and his backup singers. The list of “everyone elses” in this series is full of players who are stars in their own right, and interesting stories abound. There’s Adley Rutschman, who before the season felt about as likely to turn in an MVP-caliber campaign as Henderson. He’d chartered a meteoric course through his first two years, providing a corner outfielder’s bat with elite defense at the toughest position on the diamond. But he’s been worse across the board in 2024; he’s barely hitting better than league average, and his work behind the plate is at a career low as well. Maybe it’s just fatigue – no catcher has made more plate appearances than Rutschman over the past two years — but he went from a 123 wRC+ at the All-Star Break to a 73 in the second half, and the underlying metrics are ugly.
Take Cole Ragans, Kansas City’s game one starter. Fifteen months ago, he got traded for Aroldis Chapman straight up, a minor part of the Rangers’ trade deadline improvements as they chased the playoffs. Ragans has been one of the best starters in the game since the day he arrived in Kansas City. He took the ball 32 times and looks likely to finish in the top three for Cy Young in his first full season as a big league starter. Is it a little weird that he went from roster afterthought to ace? Sure, but the underlying numbers back up his remarkable transformation. He’s missing bats at an elite level. He has three excellent pitches, plus two average ones to break out in case of emergency. Like Rutschman, though, the workload might be catching up to him.
His Game 1 opponent, Corbin Burnes, already has a Cy Young win in his back pocket, and he’ll almost certainly finish in the top five this year as well. He’s a very different pitcher than he was back in 2021, when he struck out more than a third of opposing batters and led the league in everything except innings pitched. These days, he’s using his cutter to generate weak contact instead of miss bats. His two breaking balls, a hammer curve and tight slider, are still fearsome. He’s throwing as hard as ever.
The Orioles would love to have him, and he’s going to give the Royals a huge edge in the game he starts. Overall, Kansas City has a meaningful edge on the pitching side. They’ll bring the better starter to the mound in all three games. Their bullpen isn’t quite the best in baseball, but it’s above average, with deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg leading the way and a pile of converted starters behind him. Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch IV, Michael Lorenzen — all of them can go multiple innings if necessary, and all of them have been fairly successful this year. Angel Zerpa and John Schreiber have been good too. Maybe this isn’t quite the 2014 and 2015 Royals ‘pen, but it’s no walking meltdown either.
