A senior left-handed pitcher toed the mound for Newberg High School in Oregon one evening in late April 2016. His team had lost 12 straight games and would go on to lose its next seven. It would finish with one conference win — this one.
Mason Herring was only a few weeks away from hanging up his baseball spikes for good. He’d half-considered playing for a community college, but instead decided to enlist in the Navy and would start boot camp in July. But on that Tuesday night, playing for a woeful team against the most feared hitter in the state, he pitched the best game of his career, a one-hit shutout and a 1-0 win over superior Sherwood High.
On that night, he struck out that much-heralded peer: Adley Rutschman.
If Herring, who is now a nuclear reactor operator instructor with the U.S. Navy based in South Carolina, sees Rutschman on TV or hears mention of the Orioles catcher, he’s quick to mention the 2016 game and his brush with baseball glory.
“I definitely bring up the fact that I beat his team in a 1-0 victory,” he said. “I don’t play sports anymore, so that’s my one highlight that I go back to.”
Rutschman, Oregon’s 2016 high school baseball Gatorade Player of the Year, could throw 94 mph off the pitcher’s mound and set a state football record with a 63-yard field goal. At the plate, he was even better. His senior year, he had an on-base-percentage of .541 and struck out only three times — putting Herring in rare company.
While Herring hasn’t “touched a baseball” since 2016, Jeremiah Duran, the first pitcher to strike Rutschman out his senior year, is still playing in college. Another one of the trio of pitchers, Matt Voelzke, competed against Rutschman many times — and was later coached by the star catcher’s dad.
Herring remembers pitching the one-hitter against Sherwood — in which he struck out seven batters — but didn’t remember retiring Rutschman himself. Although Rutschman was one of the most lauded players in the region, Herring said he was too in-the-zone to recall who he’d rung up. He did specifically remember, though, when Rutschman once hit him with a pitch. “It was a heater,” he said. “I could definitely feel it.”
Since being struck out just thrice in 109 plate appearances (getting rung up a paltry 2.8% of the time), Rutschman has only ascended. He was a prized Oregon State recruit, starring as a catcher but also handling kickoff duties for the football team, and won a College World Series title. The Orioles selected him No. 1 overall in the 2019 MLB draft — a beacon of a promised rebuild not yet in view — and his call-up to the big league club in 2022 coincided almost precisely with the team’s renaissance.
Now, the Orioles are one of the best teams in the American League and the 26-year-old catcher will make his second MLB All-Star Game appearance on Tuesday night at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. Showing just how far the club has come since 2019, Rutschman will catch Orioles ace Corbin Burnes to start the Midsummer Classic, while fellow Orioles Gunnar Henderson, Anthony Santander and Jordan Westburg also will represent the American League.
Meanwhile, Duran is playing in a summer league in preparation for his final year of college baseball. Duran, who played for two junior colleges before landing at Bethesda University of California, was just 15 years old and listed at 5 feet 8, 140 pounds during his sophomore year at Chaffey High School in Southern California.
Early that season, in March 2016, his team played a school from Oregon that had a “catcher with a great arm,” Duran remembered. He didn’t recall much else about the out-of-state team that he pitched against until he was informed recently that he struck out Rutschman. (The Baltimore Sun was able to identify which pitchers accomplished the feat via game logs provided by Sherwood High School baseball coach Nate Hickok paired with statistics and rosters listed online.)
“I’m very shocked right now,” Duran said. “I didn’t even know I was on the same field as him.”
No one was as thrilled, though, as Duran’s 9-year-old brother, whose favorite player in the “MLB: The Show” video game is Rutschman. He’s always “Adley this, Adley that,” Duran said of his brother.
“He looked like a kid in a candy store, it seemed like,” Duran said. “He was walking around saying, ‘My brother did that? No way!’”
Duran, who turns 24 this month, is now listed at 6-1 and pitches for Bethesda, a school that competes in the National Christian College Athletic Association. On that March day, though, the skinny sophomore allowed three runs over four innings, got the win, and struck out three hitters — including Rutschman.
Voelzke grew up playing in similar circles as Rutschman and the two competed against each other in both club and varsity baseball for years. Playing for Lake Oswego High School, Voelzke struck Rutschman out in the sixth inning of a conference game in May, late in both of their senior years. Voelzke agreed that, over the years, the hard-throwing Rutschman probably struck him out a couple of times, too.
There were other elite athletes in Oregon high school baseball that year, including Los Angeles Chargers quarterback and then-All-State first baseman Justin Herbert. But Rutschman “stood out as definitely the best,” Voelzke recalled.
Voelzke went out to play Division III baseball, where Rutschman’s father, Randy, worked as an assistant coach. That made Rutschman’s power display in last year’s Home Run Derby — when he swatted home runs from both sides of the plate with his dad pitching to him — even more memorable for Voelzke.
“It was super cool seeing his dad throw to him, since he threw [batting practice] to us so many times,” he said.
Rutschman has received American League Most Valuable Player votes in both of his big league seasons, finished second in AL Rookie of the Year voting in 2022 and won a Silver Slugger Award last year. He’s struck out a few more than three times in his MLB career — although he gets rung up at a lower-than-average rate — but has a penchant for finding a way to get on base. Last year, he had the fifth-highest on-base percentage (.374) in the AL.
That was true in high school, too, when he was walked 31 times (out of those 109 plate appearances). Nobody wanted to pitch to him, Hickok, one of his high school coaches, remembered. In one game, a playoff win, Rutschman smacked “the hardest hit ball that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hickok said. It sailed over the right field fence.
“It wasn’t even worth watching because it was so, just, bombed,” he said, adding: “He was kind of a man amongst boys.”
On three rare occasions, though, he was bested by high school peers. Now, they can proudly say they struck out a two-time All-Star.
A previous version of this story incorrectly reported Rutschman’s on-base percentage ranking in the American League last year. The Sun regrets the error.