SARASOTA, Fla. — When the Orioles selected Adley Rutschman with the first overall pick in the 2019 draft, he was seen as the light at the end of Baltimore’s rebuilding tunnel.
That promise was true, as the ballclub suddenly became competitive shortly after the star catcher’s arrival in May 2022. About two months later, the Orioles still had the No. 1 pick in the draft as a result of losing 110 games the previous year and selected 18-year-old high school infielder Jackson Holliday.
Unlike Rutschman, Holliday’s nearing arrival to the big leagues — potentially as soon as opening day on March 28 — isn’t meant to turn the Orioles around, but rather to bolster what is already one of the American League’s best teams.
Rutschman hasn’t wavered despite the expectations placed upon him as the sport’s top prospect. Gunnar Henderson, selected with Baltimore’s second pick in the 2019 draft, took the baton from Rutschman and handled the same pressure with aplomb.
Now it’s up to Holliday to do the same. Like Rutschman and Henderson before him, the Orioles believe the 20-year-old top prospect will do just that.
“They’re all confident, mature, driven players,” said Matt Blood, the Orioles’ vice president of player development and domestic scouting. “They’re humble in the right ways. They don’t worry too much about the noise on the outside, and they just want to kick your [butt].”
The young talent the Orioles have accumulated is nearly unprecedented in recent MLB history. Since Baseball America began ranking prospects in 1990, only once before these Orioles has an MLB team sported back-to-back No. 1 prospects entering a season. Baltimore is the first organization to have three straight.
With Holliday at the top, the Orioles still have baseball’s best farm system despite several top young players no longer qualifying as prospects and a handful of notable players being traded to other organizations.
“To still be the No. 1 farm system — even after you graduated Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, who were No. 1 overall prospects, and Grayson Rodriguez, who was the top pitching prospect at one point — is insane,” said Jim Callis, who covers prospects for MLB Pipeline, whose rankings also have Holliday in the top spot. “To go from Adley to Gunnar to Jackson with very little gap in between is crazy.”
Holliday is at spring training competing for a spot on the Orioles’ opening day roster. It’s not a foregone conclusion he will, as Baltimore boasts one of the deepest 40-man rosters in the AL. But his arrival at Camden Yards will almost certainly happen sometime in 2024.
The middle infielder is less than two years removed from sitting in high school classes, but after he soared through the minor leagues to a degree not seen in decades, he believes he can hang in the show.
“I’m as ready as I can be,” Holliday said at the beginning of spring training.
At 19 years old, Holliday went from Low-A to Triple-A and posted a .941 OPS in his first professional season. The only other American-born top prospect since 2006 to take a week’s worth of at-bats at Triple-A in his age-19 season was Bryce Harper, and he did so in his second full professional campaign.
Whether Holliday can perform throughout a full big league season remains to be seen, although few are doubting the five-tool prospect. Despite his age, his teammates — from veteran catcher James McCann to his fellow former No. 1 prospects — believe Holliday is mature enough for the rigors of the big leagues.
“He’s a professional,” said Rutschman, who debuted at 24 years old. “He’s fitting right in. It’s amazing for how young he is how confident he is.”
“He’s got a really good head on his shoulders,” said Henderson, who was 21 in his first big league game.
McCann, one of the Orioles’ oldest players at 33, has twin 6-year-old boys who sometimes run around the clubhouse or take hacks in the outfield with dad. Fourteen years ago, Holliday was in the same position, as the energetic kid and son of seven-time All-Star Matt Holliday grew up in big league clubhouses.
It’s no secret that at least a portion of Holliday’s talent comes from his dad’s genes — although his work ethic during the past two offseasons is why he’s risen to the top of prospect lists. But his level-headed demeanor, coaches and teammates say, is a credit to his experience around the game at an early age.
“His dad was an incredible player and still is an incredible baseball mind, so obviously he has someone very close to him that he can always just go back to,” McCann said. “He already has the persona to make it happen and obviously the talent. Now it’s just a matter of letting the chips fall where they may.”
The elder Holliday doesn’t know what it’s like to be a top prospect, though. He never cracked Baseball America’s top 100 during his time in the minors before hitting 316 career home runs with the Colorado Rockies, St. Louis Cardinals, Oakland Athletics and New York Yankees.
For his son to learn to manage the expectations of being a No. 1 prospect, he believes having Rutschman and Henderson as “resources” will be beneficial, on top of his big league upbringing.
“I think he’s ahead of the game in that element,” Matt Holliday said. “He has a very even-keeled personality that I think is ideal. That’s not to say there won’t be days that he’ll feel pressure, and there’s going to be days where he presses a little bit. There will be days that he feels baseball is really, really hard, because it is. But he has the mentality and the demeanor that will handle these outside pressures.”
In 2022, Rutschman finished second in AL Rookie of the Year voting behind Seattle’s Julio Rodríguez, earning himself a full year of service time. Last year, Henderson won the award — the Orioles’ first since right-hander Gregg Olson in 1989 — to garner the Orioles an additional first-round draft pick. Holliday, like Henderson was entering 2023, is a slight betting favorite to bring home the award, as DraftKings lists the Orioles youngster ahead of Texas Rangers outfielders Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford.
However, success didn’t come immediately for Holliday’s predecessors. Rutschman hit just .176 without a home run in his first 20 major league games. Henderson, who debuted and played well at the end of 2022, slumped to begin last season with a .170 average over his first 100 at-bats.
Whether this spring, summer or fall, Holliday will struggle at some point in 2024 as all big leaguers do, and how he adjusts will ultimately determine if he can reach his potential.
“I felt like I was trying to be a little bit too perfect last year,” Henderson said. “It’s easier said than done, but I’d tell him to just be aggressive and be OK with failing. It’s very hard at the beginning because you don’t want to mess up at all, especially first time in the big leagues. But failure is in baseball and you’ve just got to go out there and accept it.
“That’s the biggest thing — having that confidence in yourself. And your teammates can help build that confidence as well. I know I’ll be here for that to help him in any way he needs.”
Rutschman and Henderson aren’t the only ones around the club who have experience with sky-high expectations. Former Orioles pitcher Ben McDonald, now a member of the club’s broadcast team as an analyst, was drafted by Baltimore with the first overall pick in the 1989 draft — the first top selection in franchise history.
McDonald, a right-hander out of LSU, received a groundbreaking three-year guaranteed contract worth $950,000 — nearly quadruple the bonus given to the previous year’s top pick — because of his pedigree as one of the best pitching prospects in modern baseball history. He pitched just two games in the minor leagues before debuting in late August of Baltimore’s “Why Not?” 1989 campaign — the last player to be drafted first overall and make the majors in the same season.
“It was one of the more difficult times in my life. I honestly didn’t enjoy baseball a whole lot because of those expectations,” said McDonald, who had a good big league career but wasn’t the dominant pitcher scouts envisioned because of persistent shoulder issues. “I tried to live up to ’em, which was the worst thing in the world. When you try to live up to certain expectations, you try to please others. I think that starts a downhill spiral. There were a lot of nights in my career when I banged my head up against the wall wondering why I couldn’t consistently have success at the big league level.”
But McDonald didn’t have footsteps to follow like Holliday does in Rutschman and Henderson. To handle the mantle of baseball’s top prospect, McDonald said a player has to be mentally tough with a certain moxy that he believes the Orioles’ trio has.
“What strikes me about these young kids is the confidence they have,” he said. “It’s pretty impressive. These are good guys, good kids. They come to work every day, they work hard. It’s not cocky; it’s confidence. They’re not a bunch of [jerks]. They’re just good dudes.”
It’s also not skipper Brandon Hyde’s first time managing a young star with weight on his shoulders. Before the Orioles’ trio, Hyde was an assistant with the Chicago Cubs when top 100 prospects Javier Báez, Kris Bryant, Jorge Soler, Kyle Schwarber and Willson Contreras navigated their early days in the big leagues.
Hyde, entering his sixth season with the Orioles, said Holliday is a “very mature” 20-year-old. But his goal with the youngster — as it was with Henderson and Rutschman — is to “take as much pressure off him as possible.”
“I’ve seen No. 1 prospects come to the big leagues before and seen the hype and the fanfare and peoples’ expectation is that they’re going to be superstars right away, and that’s very, very challenging,” Hyde said. “These guys have to worry about by just trying to fit into the big leagues on top of the expectations people have for ‘em. I just try to downplay it as much as I possibly can and try to have ‘em relax.”
That’s the same advice Rutschman has for Holliday — to “slow down the moments that get big.” The All-Star catcher used that same tactic before his debut.
Before getting into his squat on a big league field for the first time, Rutschman took a moment and surveyed Camden Yards to “soak it in.”
It won’t be long before Holliday is doing the same.
Baltimore Sun reporter Matt Weyrich contributed to this article.