An hour and a half prior to first pitch, Kyle Bradish went out to the field and looked around.

For the past 14 months, he’s watched Orioles games as he recovered from Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery feeling “miserable,” as interim manager Tony Mansolino said, that he wasn’t able to be on the mound.

On Tuesday, that all changed. So in this moment on the field, he allowed himself to reflect on the road back. All the work he’s put in was for one goal: to be able to pitch at a high level again without elbow pain.

“There were definitely a lot of emotions just throughout the whole day,” Bradish said. “A lot of nerves as the game got closer and just looking back at kind of the journey I’ve been on the past 14 months to get back to where I am here.”

When it was time for the game, he ran out of the dugout alone, full steam ahead to the mound, pounding his fists together as he reached his destination. There are always doubts when a player returns from a surgery of this caliber. Will he be the same player he was before? Will the surgery hold up? Is he truly ready?

It did not take long for Bradish to provide a definitive answer to those questions.

Bradish’s return went as well as anyone could have hoped: he pitched six innings, allowing just two runs and striking out 10 — one shy of his career high — in the Orioles’ 5-0 loss to the Red Sox.

“The stuff he has is unbelievable,” catcher Alex Jackson said. “That for his first starting coming back, that’s really impressive what he was able to do.”

Bradish’s velocity, often a concern after Tommy John, was exactly where it needed to be, if not even better. He averaged 94.9 mph with his sinker and 94.3 with his four-seam fastball — almost exactly where he was in 2023, his breakout season that saw him finish fourth in American League Cy Young voting. He topped out at 97.8 mph, the highest velocity for an Orioles starting pitcher this season.

Bradish’s first two pitches of the game were fastballs way wide of the zone — pitches that can probably be blamed on the pent-up energy he was feeling from months of waiting for this moment. Then, he reined it in. He got Red Sox star rookie Roman Anthony to pop out, then struck out Alex Bregman and Jarren Duran for a 1-2-3 inning.

The nerves finally went away after the first inning, Bradish said. Now, he was just a normal pitcher again.

“I just felt like I was back to doing what I was meant to be doing,” he said.

In the second, Trevor Story hit a home run off the first pitch of the inning. Bradish watched it sail over the left-field wall, then immediately asked the home plate umpire for a new ball. An inning later, David Hamilton also took the first pitch of the inning long, and Bradish again immediately re-focused.

“They just got the barrels to them,” Jackson said. “Might have been a little bit caught too much of the plate, and they were just able to put good swings on it. But he kept coming after guys, attacking the zone like I said, making good pitches up. There was a lot of good out of that outing.”

From there, Bradish was nearly perfect. He allowed just two other hits, both singles. He was on a pitch limit, as is typical for pitchers working their way back from Tommy John, but was so efficient he made it through six innings on 81 pitches.

“Throughout the whole process, I really felt confident that I would get back to where I was last year and the year before, and I think that I kind of proved that today,” he said. “Obviously, there’s a lot more ball to be played, but I think it was a step in the right direction.”

As he walked to the dugout after getting Duran swinging to end the sixth, fans stood on their feet to welcome back their ace. For the past five months, they’ve watched a team with so much talent plummet, in part because of its lack of quality starting pitching. With Bradish back on the mound there was some hope in the air that, if Bradish can look like this after missing so much time, the Orioles could get things going in the right direction next season.

“We said in the warmup pitches in the first inning, just watching the warmup pitches, I told [pitching coach Drew French], ‘That looks different,’” Mansolino said. “We haven’t seen stuff like that out of the rotation all year. Now, we’ve got guys with good stuff, but Bradish, we’ve talked about him, is the type of guy that, if he stays healthy, it’s ace-type stuff, it’s ace-type pitchability, it’s absolutely an ace mentality. He’s just got to do it for a while.”

A turnaround will require the lineup to do its job, too, which didn’t happen Tuesday night. While Bradish put on a show, so did Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito, who pitched eight shutout innings, holding the Orioles to four hits.