Maybe the most telling bit of lore about Orioles pitcher Grayson Rodriguez begins, ironically, with a home run.
“Growing up, I was actually a better hitter than a pitcher,” he says, though this story features a blend of both skills.
In the first scrimmage of his junior year at Central Heights High School in the small East Texas city of Nacogdoches, the already 6-foot-5 Rodriguez swung hard at an inside fastball. A left-handed batter, he muscled a homer to right field but hurt his pitching hand (the right one) in the process—wrist tendinitis, an athletic trainer later told him.
For the rest of the season, it pained him to hit and throw, but even with a compression wrap around his hand, he still threw harder than 90 miles per hour. Still, it wasn’t quite the more attention-grabbing 95 mph that had put him on pro prospect lists a year earlier. Scouts, who’d been coming around, stopped showing up for his starts. Rodriguez guessed they thought he was regressing and maybe wrongly presumed he’d become complacent, already having an offer to play college ball at nearby Texas A&M.
What they—and he—didn’t know was that Rodriguez was throwing with a broken hand. A doctor’s visit following the season revealed he had a cracked hamate bone. It’s just below the pinky and ring finger, a delicate spot, especially for a pitcher who relies on gripping a baseball. After surgery to repair the break, Rodriguez’s velocity returned—he reached 98 miles per hour as a senior—and the scouts did, too.
Six years later, the stakes and expectations could not be higher. At 24, he’s more seasoned and more muscular, though at 230 pounds, given his height, he’s still not bulky.
The fastball he slings now at Camden Yards often touches 100 miles per hour, running in on righties and away from lefties. The off-speed pitches he has developed since he was drafted with the 11th overall pick in 2018—like an 85-ish mile-an-hour changeup that drops an average of three feet—often confound the best pro hitters.
“I feel like I’m a very competitive person, and baseball is something I can do where I can be competitive,” Rodriguez told Baltimore at the start of the season. “I like the one-on-one, me versus the hitter, being able to have a fight with the guy that steps in the box, every five days. It’s a lot of fun.”
Today, with stops at Orioles minor-league affiliates in Delmarva, Bowie, Aberdeen, and Norfolk, Virginia, behind him, Rodriguez is a bona fide big leaguer and the most electric and beloved homegrown hurler on the O’s roster. He sits among the Major League leaders in wins and strikeouts through his first five starts, and gives last year’s AL East division champs a chance to win every time he takes the mound. (Dedicated fans on social media celebrate “Grayson Rodriguez Day” when it’s his turn to pitch.)
“He’s got the ability to reach triple-digits as a starter, and he’s got the ability to do it late in the game, late in the season, and that’s not something you see very often,” says Norfolk Tides pitching coach Justin Ramsey, whose career in the Orioles’ farm system rose alongside Rodriguez. “And he’s a freak when it comes to how he’s able to generate the spins on the baseball, whether it’s the fastball, the breaking balls, the changeups, whatever. It’s special. The sky’s the limit for him.”
