Red Sox Add Insult to Orioles' Injury With Adley Rutschman Moment

Over the weekend, the Boston Red Sox may well have ended the Baltimore Orioles' season with a four-game sweep in the O's home ballpark. On Monday, they rubbed some salt in the wound.

Five weeks after the Red Sox famously acquired catcher Adley Rutschman from the Orioles for a haul of five players, Rutschman hit a laser of a home run against the Los Angeles Angels in the bottom of the second inning.

Yes, the blast gave the Red Sox a 4-0 lead in an otherwise boilerplate game they won 5-2 (their fifth win in a row, by the way). But to Orioles fans watching from afar, the moment had much deeper meaning, and in a very painful fashion.

Rutschman takes former Orioles first-round pick yard

Who was the pitcher for the 112.1 mph missile Rutschman hit off the Pesky Pole? That would be one Grayson Rodriguez, who the Orioles took with the 11th overall pick in the 2018 Major League Baseball Draft.

Yes, if you're counting, that means Rodriguez and Rutschman were the Orioles' first-rounders in back-to-back seasons, and those seasons happened at the very beginning of the Baltimore teardown, the same summer they traded away future Hall of Fame candidate Manny Machado.

Imagine reading this sentence in 2023:

Boston Red Sox catcher Adley Rutschman clobbers a 112 mph home run off Los Angeles Angels starting pitcher Grayson Rodriguez. pic.twitter.com/swEpp4rcmu
— Jacob Calvin Meyer (@jcalvinmeyer) September 7, 2026

While this was all happening, the Orioles finally won a game on Monday. It broke a six-game losing streak that dropped them right out of the thick of the American League wild-card chase.

Rodriguez and Rutschman were the Orioles' best pitching and position player prospects going into some of their darkest years, and it looked like they were the potential faces of the resurgence in 2022 and 2023, as they made their way to the majors in those seasons (it was Rutschman who came up first).

But while Rutschman went on to make three All-Star teams in his first five seasons, Rodriguez struggled to establish himself, and some injury issues along the way didn't help. He wound up pitching only 43 games with a 4.11 ERA in an Orioles uniform before he was traded to the Angels last winter for outfielder Taylor Ward.

Ward is a member of the Seattle Mariners now, of course.

Even after setting out to write this column with the full intention of dunking on the Orioles, this turned out harsher than expected. But what fun is it to have division rivals if you can't inflict a little extra pain every once in a while?

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