Every once in a while, the Baltimore Orioles call up a prospect and catcher James McCann does a double take.
There it is again, he thinks.
“It’s almost like in the dating world, when you look at all the people you’ve dated, they all have similar characteristics,” he says. “You say, yeah, I guess I have a type. I guess the Orioles have a type.”
For the most part, that means a young, athletic position player who controls the strike zone well and hits with some power. That combination is working well for the Orioles, whose 49-25 record is tied for second-best in the sport. But as many fans (and the players themselves) have noted, those traits have recently manifested themselves in some youngsters who bear a striking resemblance to each other.
The top four doubles are shortstop Gunnar Henderson, 22, catcher Adley Rutschman, 26, outfielder Heston Kjerstad, 25, and second baseman Jackson Holliday, 20. Kjerstad and Holliday, both 2023 Futures Game alumni who struggled in their recent call-ups, are currently in Triple A. Henderson and Rutschman are currently the Orioles’ best players.
All four stand a little over 6 feet tall, all wear their light hair curled around their ears, all boast high cheekbones and the bright eyes of someone who watched the 2018 Orioles, who lost 115, only from afar. Until Henderson started experimenting with facial hair this year, everyone was clean shaven.
Most people on the team insist that the resemblance is superficial. “They’re all young,” says left-hander Cole Irvin, 30. “They still don’t know what they want to do with the mustache or the beard.”
Still, Irvin admits that he has sometimes confused Rutschman and Kjerstad from behind. (Manager Brandon Hyde says his biggest problem is that left-hander Cade Povich, 24, is the spitting image of Hyde’s 16-year-old son Colton.)
Players and coaches can tell them apart. Fans can’t always. Last year, when the rookies dressed up as Mr. Splash, a team employee who snorkels and celebrates Orioles extra-base hits by spraying water on the crowd in the Bird Bath section, a fan caught Henderson’s attention. “Adley!” the person screamed. So Henderson obediently scribbled to Adley Rutschman. “It wasn’t even a signature,” he says now with a smile.
One official, in a nod to the Orioles’ cutting-edge reputation, jokes that the team used artificial intelligence to Draft players based on the idea that facial symmetry means good genes, which means physical health, which means running speed. exit.
Not everyone finds the idea so fun. Vice president of communications Jennifer Grondahl, who listened to one of the interviews for this story, objected to the premise, insisting that she didn’t see the resemblance and that the Orioles have plenty of prospects who look different.
Rutschman and Henderson have led the Orioles to a promising 49-25 record. / Tommy Gilligan-KeynoteUSA Sports
This story offers a window into more than just a shared barber and skincare routine. The young Orioles are similar because they mostly took a similar path to the big leagues, starting as white kids born in the United States. That population is overrepresented in the Baltimore organization as a consequence of a long-standing policy of the late former owner Peter Angelos, who viewed Latin American prospects as a risky investment. Only when his son John Angelos took over the team’s day-to-day operations, around the time general manager Mike Elias was hired in November 2018, did the organization begin to take the international market more seriously.
According to Spotrac, the Orioles didn’t spend more than $800,000 on an international prospect until they gave catcher Samuel Basallo $1.3 million and shortstop Maikol Hernández $1.2 million in 2021. (Ten teams, including famous and thrifty Tampa Bay Rays, were dishing out seven- (the figure goes back to 2012, which is as old as Spotrac’s data). That 2021 signing class, which the Orioles paid approximately $5.75 million, earned more than the classes from 2012 to 2018 combined. Today, nine of Baltimore’s top 30 prospects, according to MLB.com, come from overseas, but in 2020, when current major leaguers were farmhands, that number was just two.
Most of those Latin American players, in their teens and 20s, are still making their way through the lower minor leagues. Meanwhile, as the team built its international system, it relied on the draft, where black players are underrepresented. (Black players are underrepresented throughout baseball, where they make up just 6.0% of rosters despite representing about 14% of the U.S. population.) Because the team was so bad for so long, the Orioles picked at the top of the first round. that’s where they found Rutschman (No. 1 in 2019), Kjerstad (No. 2 in ’20) and Holliday (No. 1 in ’22). (Henderson had to wait until the second round in 2019.)
And so, in a league in which 27.5% of the players were born outside the United States, the Orioles’ roster is only 19.5% international, and the prospects who have graduated together and who form the core young players of the Orioles are quite homogeneous. The plan is for that to change soon: Basallo in particular looks promising and could debut next year.
He’ll join a team full of diamond lookalikes who laugh at their facial similarity but take pride in another similarity, summed up by Elias: “The way they’re alike is they’re all very good players.”
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