Adley Rutschman was freshly the Orioles’ No. 1 pick, and I was trying to learn as much about him as I could. I was navigating to a coffee shop in Fort Worth, Texas, when all I’d ever need to know came through my speakerphone.

Joe Taylor, Rutschman’s high school travel ball coach, told me about the Buddhist term Mudita, which is essentially empathetic joy: taking pleasure in the success of those around you. To him, it came to define Rutschman — and Orioles fans have learned that to be the case in the years since.

I thought of that a lot as this season wore on, because it felt like the opposite. We know the Orioles weren’t the same, and it felt like Rutschman wasn’t either. Perhaps those things were symbiotic in ways we weren’t quite clocking during the season, with the injuries that stacked up all around Rutschman and the headwinds the team faced weighing on him and pulling his performance down.

Either way, I’ve been thinking a lot about Rutschman this month because, any time I’m asked about the Orioles’ playoff exit or second-half collapse, I say a lot of “Well, you knows” and eventually land on the idea that if Rutschman was himself in the second half the Orioles’ whole season is different.

That’s a lot to put on one person for a team that had so much, good and bad, happen over the six months of the regular season. And it’s not to say he’s to blame — at all. What’s earned the most attention in the aftermath of their sweep at the hands of the Kansas City Royals is the situational hitting, with constant underwhelming outcomes with runners in scoring position serving to rob the Orioles of several wins in the second half, to say nothing of the damage this had on their psyche and the team’s overall vibes.

So why single out Rutschman? It’s worth pointing out that his wasn’t the steepest decline in RISP production on the team. Gunnar Henderson’s was worse from the first half to the second half, with his OPS falling from .934 to .659 with runners in scoring position over those two windows. But Henderson’s overall OPS in the second half was still .799 — and at 131 his weighted runs-created plus (wRC+) after the All-Star break was still 31% above league average.

Rutschman’s fall with runners in scoring position mirrored his overall decline for the season. Given the rate he succeeded in those run-producing opportunities in the past — both his first two seasons and the first half of this one — it feels as though the impact was particularly outsized.

Somehow, in one of those odd statistical occurrences that only happens in baseball, Rutschman had a .797 OPS with runners in scoring position in each of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 seasons. He arrived at that endpoint this year by going into the All-Star break with an .867 OPS (141 wRC+) with runners in scoring position and falling to a .669 OPS (78 wRC+) in the second half.

(For broader context of Rutschman’s season, his overall first-half OPS was .780, with 123 wRC+, and he was down to .585 and a 70 wRC+ after the break. I’ve long used the foul ball he took off his hand in late June against the Rangers as the demarcation point of his decline, but since no injury has been revealed, the All-Star break feels like the cleanest cutoff for this purpose.)

We know the team itself fell off in the second half, and when someone who has been your most consistent player for two-plus years falls off, that makes a big difference. But the margins were fine, and Rutschman had plenty of opportunities to come through in those RISP situations and didn’t as often as he had in the past. How much of an impact on the overall season does that have?

That’s where it gets tricky. The Orioles finished three games behind the Yankees in the division. There are probably dozens of at-bats from all of their important players that, had they gone in the Orioles’ favor, swing what amounts to one additional win in each of the last three months of the season.

In that sense, it’s not fair to place the blame all on Rutschman, especially given who wasn’t in the lineup for large stretches of the second half and the fact that Henderson also struggled to produce.

What’s most unusual is that, despite the highs of the first half and lows of the second, Rutschman ended up in line with where he was the previous two seasons with runners in scoring position. He wasn’t striking out any more in the second half, and he was still putting together good at-bats. He just wasn’t impacting the ball as much as the second half went on.

It’s happened at other times in his career — most notably the beginning. When we spoke in spring training for a story on the hindsight available to look upon his own major league transition, he said: “I felt like when I got to the big leagues I saw the ball well, but I guess the emotions, nerves, you’re swinging with a little more gusto, maybe. You kind of let the amperage get to you a little bit, and you’re clipping balls a little bit that you should be flushing, making slight adjustments, then you struggle a little bit and you’re like, ‘Is this mental or a physical mistake?’ and letting those thoughts grow in your head is tough.”

For basically two years, that wasn’t Rutschman’s circumstance. For whatever reason, it feels like it was in the second half.

Although it’s unfair to place too much of what happened with these Orioles on Rutschman’s shoulders, he is likely putting a fair bit more than anyone else would on his own ledger in terms of responsibility.

I still think it’s fair to say things at least would have felt a lot different if he was himself in that second half — and considering the second half felt pretty bad, that would mean it went a lot better. I wouldn’t bet against him getting right by spring and being himself again.

In the meantime, might not be a terrible time to call about a contract extension.