Orioles' catching tandem could easily make or break the 2026 season

Getting good production from the catching position is one of the most underrated aspects of really good baseball teams. Look at the catchers on the last four teams standing last season: Cal Raleigh, Will Smith, Alejandro Kirk, and William Contreras. With all due respect to Shea Langaliers and Dillon Dingler, were those not the four best catchers in baseball last season? Think about how much better the Orioles were for the first couple of years of Adley Rutschman's career when he was one of the best catchers in the league; that wasn't a coincidence.

Last week, Fangraphs released their position group rankings for catchers and paid the Orioles respect, placing them fourth behind only Seattle, Toronto, and San Francisco, and neck-and-neck with Milwaukee. The Orioles being that high was surprising to some people, considering that Rutschman is coming off a career-worst season and Basallo is something of a mystery box.

Orioles need both of their high variance catchers to high roll in 2026

The main reason the Orioles are so high is that the various projection systems that Fangraphs leans on for these rankings still like Adley Rutschman. Most projection systems have Rutschman projected to put up somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0 fWAR. ZiPS has him putting up 4.7 fWAR.

So while fantasy experts and statline scouts have given up on the Orioles backstop, the computer thinks he's alright. Here's the thing, though, if Rutschman is actually all the way back healthy, he's not a 3.5 WAR catcher; he's a 5.5 WAR catcher, so even the computers that are "high" on Rutschman could be underrating him.

The player whom the computers are really underrating, though, is Samuel Basallo. It's understandable that the computers can only project based on the data available to them, and what Basallo gave them most recently was not impressive. Most young rookies with high swing rates struggle in the majors. With all the variables and unknowns hanging around such a young prospect, it makes sense that most of the projection systems have him putting up somewhere between .5 and 1.5 WAR in 2026.

What the computers can't do is watch Samuel Basallo this spring training and see that he's got motion. Go and watch his at-bats over the last two weeks of spring training and decide for yourself if that's a .5 WAR player. Basallo looks extremely comfortable in the batter's box right now. He's relaxed, he's smiling, and he's hitting lasers over the right field wall with regularity. He looks like an entirely different player than the guy who got called up at the end of 2025.

If Rutschman is back to his 2023/ early 2024 self and Basallo breaks out, the Orioles aren't going to have the fourth-best catching unit in baseball; they're going to have the best one. As we've seen in the past few years, having the best catching unit in baseball is a cheat code for making the postseason. That's a lot of "ifs," though. On the flip side, if Rutschman is hurt and Basallo has typical rookie struggles, that might sink the Orioles' season. No pressure, though.