From waiver wire casualty to All-Star starter, Ryan O'Hearn reveals the complex journey behind his remarkable baseball resurgence.
Ryan O’Hearn was designated for assignment twice in less than a month in 2023. He started in the All-Star Game last year.
So, how does a player go through such a low to such a high in a relatively short period of time? The Pittsburgh Pirates’ first baseman/outfielder doesn’t have a simple answer for his ascension from the scrapheap to the Midsummer Classic, where he started for the American League as the designated hitter.
“I think it's really a combination of a lot of things,” said O’Hearn, who signed a two-year, $29-million contract earlier this month with the Pirates as a free agent.
O’Hearn started his career impressively in 2018 with the Kansas City Royals when he hit .262/.353/.597 with 12 home runs in 44 games. That earned him a spot as the first baseman on the Topps MLB All-Rookie Team.
However, O’Hearn hit just .211/.282/.351 with 26 homers in 298 games over the next four seasons. In the 2022-23 offseason, the Royals sent O’Hearn to the Baltimore Orioles in a cash transaction.
The Orioles dropped O’Hearn off their 40-man roster late in spring training in 2023. That was the first of the two DFAs before he finally stuck with the Orioles for good on April 26. O’Hearn has been in the major leagues ever since, hitting .277/.343/.445 with 46 homers in 398 games over the past three seasons with the Orioles and San Diego Padres.
“I feel like I've taken something from every hitting coach I've ever worked with, and I've worked with some really great hitting coaches,” O’Hearn said. “And when I got to Baltimore for whatever reason, it kind of clicked. You know how it is in this game. When you're struggling, you can just kind of feel defeated because it's every day.
“But it's the same thing when you start to have success, you start to realize, 'Hey, I'm a guy.' I think that happened for me in 2023. Haven't stopped trying to get better, trying to work on things that I'm not good at. Last year, I wanted to get better against left-handed pitchers. There's areas of my game I feel like I can still improve on. There's really not one thing. It's been an evolution, I think.”
This might be the best example of how much O’Hearn has evolved: The Pirates liked him enough that they made him the first free agent to receive a multi-year contract from them since Ivan Nova in 2016.
O’Hearn’s perseverance and approach to hitting both stood out to Cherington while the Pirates were pursuing the 32-year-old in free agency.
“Good major league players who want to keep getting better are willing to do that, open-minded enough to do that, open-minded enough to take new information, process it, sort the stuff out that doesn’t work for them, apply the stuff that does,” Cherington said. “I think clearly he’s done that over time in more than one place. He was obviously a good amateur hitter, a good minor league hitter.
“The big leagues is different. He’s made adjustments in his decision-making. Also, the swing itself, how he’s attacking pitchers. It’s been fun talking to him about that. Maybe most important, I think he’s the type of guy who’s going to keep doing that. There’s a constant cat-and-mouse game. Guys are going to adapt and counter-attack. You have to do the same thing back. Him doing that himself is important, but it's also a model for other guys. That’s got to be a constant.”