‘He’s wound to play’ – The Denver Post

Austin Hays won’t have long between when he reaches center field at T-Mobile Park and the start of Tuesday night’s All-Star Game. But within that handful of minutes, he’ll reflect on a lifetime.

“When the first pitch is thrown and I’m standing out there,” Hays said, “I’ll just really be able to sit in that moment and think about how far I’ve been able to come.”

Hays, 28, will bat seventh and start in center for the American League as one of four Orioles who made his first All-Star team, individual recognition for a team that holds the major leagues’ third-best record (54-35) after the first half of the season.

Hays will represent Baltimore alongside catcher Adley Rutschman and relievers Félix Bautista and Yennier Cano. Each has had a different journey to this moment. Rutschman, a 2019 first overall draft pick, has long seemed destined for All-Star status. Bautista was released as a teenager and spent nearly a decade in the minors before learning to harness his devastating stuff. Cano once faced a yearlong ban from baseball in his native Cuba.

For Hays, an inability to stay healthy kept him off the field and short of his potential. As Cedric Mullins — who typically plays center for Baltimore with Hays in left — did in 2021, Hays earned his All-Star selection but drew the start as an injury replacement. Both players were seen as key members of the franchise’s future when its rebuild began, only for Hays to face injuries as Mullins struggled to perform. Now, both can say they were starting center fielders in an All-Star Game.

“I think some of the best things in life never come easy,” Mullins said. “For us to have our ups and downs, it makes the success that much more fulfilling.

“Obviously, there’s a lot of frustration, a lot of unknowns dealing with injuries like that, especially in a position where you’re trying to make a name for yourself, trying to solidify yourself as a big league player. … He showed a lot of patience with himself.”

Hays was the first member of MLB’s 2016 draft class to reach the major leagues, scorching his way through the minors in 2017. But after that stint, he went nearly two years before his next appearance with Baltimore, as injuries prevented him from playing at a high level if he was able to play at all.

He’ll take the field in Seattle more than two years removed from his last injured list stint, though he’s played through other ailments in that time. That trait has long been part of his game, sometimes to the detriment of his performance.

“There were days that you’d see him taped up or bandaged up and just not wanting to get out of the lineup,” former Orioles minor league manager Gary Kendall said. “There’s a guy who just wanted to be out there with his teammates contributing.

“He just played the game one way, and it was as a grinder. He never took a play off. He just keeps coming after you.”

Kendall saw Hays at his best. In 2017, his first full professional season, Hays hit .329 with 32 home runs and a .958 OPS between High-A and Kendall’s Double-A Bowie team to earn a September call-up. But before this year, he was unable to put together more than a couple of months of that level of performance at a time.

After struggling in his first taste of the majors, Hays was back with Kendall in 2018 dealing with a nagging left ankle injury that eventually required surgery. Under a new front office and coaching staff, Hays impressed in the spring of 2019, only to tear a ligament in his left thumb days after being sent to minor league camp. After playing for Kendall in Triple-A Norfolk for much of the year, he starred with Baltimore that September, earning a starting job to open the shortened 2020 season. But between suffering a broken rib that year and a strain in each hamstring the next year, he missed more than half of the Orioles’ next 102 games, only because his ailments were not possible to play through.

“The biggest challenge was making sure we could get him healthy because he played the game hard,” Kendall said. “That drive, it’s not in everybody. I’ve seen players with similar tools that don’t have as much joy out of the game. He gets enjoyment out of the game. He loves being out there. He was a hard guy when you had to give him a day off. He was always ready to go. He’s wound to play.”

Hays hasn’t been on the injured list since, though those two years have not gone smoothly. He has played through core, hand and wrist injuries, the last of those in particular hampering him as he slumped to end a 2022 season that marked Baltimore’s first winning campaign since his draft year. Yet even as his bat cratered, Hays believed he could help the Orioles, and thus, he played.

“He did not play healthy, but he was going to grind it out,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “I give him a ton of credit for that because a lot of guys would not have done that. We were winning. He wanted to be a part of it. He wanted to post.”

Hays regards games played as the sport’s most important statistic, but he shines in others, too. His .314 batting average is fourth in the AL, and his .853 OPS leads qualified Orioles.

“You could see had all the abilities,” said former Orioles pitcher Alex Cobb, an All-Star with the San Francisco Giants. “He’s just one of those old-school [players], gritty, no batting gloves on, tough at-bat, that’s going to give you everything he has.”

Since last season, he has increased his barrel rate — the percentage of time he produces the most desired type of contact — by nearly as much as he has decreased his chase rate, a sign he is delivering on his focus of “swinging at pitches that I can do damage on and hit hard.”

By entering each game with a plan for the pitchers Baltimore will see that day built around that goal, Hays has captured the consistency that long evaded him, believing he is in many ways a more refined version of his 2017 self.

“I don’t think I had a clear understanding of why I was getting the results that I was getting then,” Hays said. “I’ve come a long way with just being able to identify things and adapt and make changes quicker than where I was then. I’ve just grown up a lot. I’ve matured a lot. I think I’m doing a lot of similar things as what I was mechanically then. I just didn’t really know it at the time. There were definitely some growing years in there.”

It’s a path that exemplifies an aspect of the Orioles’ rebuild: giving the young players the front office inherited an opportunity and seeing which of them seized it. Hays had made an immediate impression on Hyde in the spring of 2019, the latter’s first as a major league manager. That 2017 season made Hays the organization’s top prospect, and with a rebuilding team seeking as much young talent as possible, he was seen as a vital part of its future.

“I was so impressed with his tools,” Hyde said. “The way he could run, the way he could throw, the way he could play center field, and how he could hit the ball hard to both sides of the field.

“You would see flashes of what Haysy could do.”

This year, it’s been a near-constant shine, though Hays has still been dinged up. A failed bunt attempt resulted in a gnarly injury to his right middle finger. On the same day he learned he made the All-Star team, he bruised his left hip in a collision at first base.

Hours earlier, Hyde listed off Rutschman, Bautista and Cano as Baltimore’s All-Stars during a team meeting, then took a beat. Within it, Hays let himself believe the list had reached its end.

“I felt like they were all 100% going to get in,” Hays said. “I didn’t think I was going to.”

Then Hyde enthusiastically pointed toward his outfielder: “Haysy!”

Hays thought of his young sons, Levi and Hayden, and how he will get to tell them their father is an All-Star; Levi, 2, joined his dad on the field for Monday night’s Home Run Derby. The honor will always be attached to his name the way it was for many Orioles when he first joined the organization.

“When I got drafted, this locker room was all All-Stars,” Hays said. “It was a star-studded locker room. When I was in the minor leagues, I looked up to all the guys who were in the outfield here, [Adam Jones] specifically. To share something like this with All-Star next to my name as those Orioles did when I first got drafted and first got called up, being around those guys, I feel like I’m kind of part of that brotherhood with them now.”

Although he bemoaned his injuries preventing more opportunities to play alongside that group, he savored the chance to be among this year’s All-Stars. Hyde relished being the one to tell him he would.

“When you’re a coach and a guy would run through a wall for you, those are the kind of guys you love, and that’s exactly what Austin is,” Hyde said. “He’s somebody that plays so hard and plays to win. It’s easy to pull for somebody like that.”

MLB All-Star Game

At Seattle’s T-Mobile Park

Tuesday, 8 p.m.

TV: Chs. 45, 5

Marlins at Orioles

Friday, 7:05 p.m.

TV: MASN2

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

()