ATLANTA — Before Sunday’s game, before Ryan O’Hearn set out for his first career All-Star Game appearance, Tomoyuki Sugano pulled him aside in the Orioles’ home clubhouse at Camden Yards. The Japanese pitcher, in his first season playing in Major League Baseball, understood O’Hearn’s achievement.

To commemorate it, Sugano handed Baltimore’s first baseman a bottle of Yamazaki, a Japanese whisky. O’Hearn vowed to try it on his flight to Atlanta, a toast to what has been a remarkable first half for O’Hearn, if not the team.

“I had quite a bit on the plane last night, actually,” O’Hearn said Monday.

The whisky wasn’t the only memorable part of the trip — or this week. After the Orioles’ crushing loss to the Miami Marlins, which closed the first half on a dismal note and sank the club to nine games below .500, O’Hearn boarded owner David Rubenstein’s private jet, bound for Atlanta. He was impressed by Rubenstein’s monogrammed napkins, and he called it the “coolest plane you could ever imagine.”

It was a treat — complete with Yamazaki whisky — fit for a player who never expected any of this.

“The way it has progressed has been insane,” said O’Hearn, now 31, of a career he felt might be over at any moment years earlier. “Better than anything I could have imagined.”

Instead, upon arriving in Atlanta for the All-Star Game, he found himself walking into an American League clubhouse full of some of the best players in the game. He walked down the red carpet Tuesday afternoon with his wife, Hannah, and his parents watched their son achieve a level he would’ve dreamed of — if he had dared to dream of it at all.

The path to this point is well-documented, but when O’Hearn was named Baltimore’s lone All-Star representative, interim manager Tony Mansolino found it important to impart the story upon his team once again, just to make sure they really understood what determination looks like.

O’Hearn reached the majors with Kansas City in 2018. Over the next five seasons, his plate appearances grew infrequent. By 2022, O’Hearn spent the entire year on the major league roster. Yet he received just 145 plate appearances — fewer than one per game.

With all that time on the bench, O’Hearn pondered what might come next. He contemplated moving abroad, attempting to play in Korea or Japan to prolong his life in baseball. But that time on the bench offered him something else: a chance to sit next to hitting coach John Mabry.

Together, Mabry and O’Hearn dissected pitchers and hitters, staying engaged with a game O’Hearn played little part in.

“You can be your own worst enemy sometimes as a player,” Mabry said last month, after joining the Orioles as a senior advisor. “I mean, I’ve been there myself, with what your thoughts are and what you’re thinking about. You try to turn those thoughts into something productive for yourself rather than something that’s going to take away from what you’re trying to do.”

O’Hearn realized, if this was his last opportunity to enjoy a major league clubhouse, he didn’t want to waste it. He was turning 29. There was no guarantee he’d be around Major League Baseball at 30.

So instead of bemoaning the lack of chances, he cherished whenever one arrived in the form of a late pinch-hit appearance or an infrequent start for Kansas City.

“Once I was OK with losing my baseball career,” O’Hearn said in 2023, “it freed me up.”

Over the second half of the 2022 season, O’Hearn found more success. In his final 29 games that season, O’Hearn hit .294 with a .748 on-base-plus-slugging percentage. It was a sign for things to come — even if it didn’t come in Kansas City.

“He began to find himself when those everyday at-bats didn’t come around as much, and he began to be really good at pinch hitting,” said Whit Merrifield, a two-time All-Star with the Royals who retired this year. “And then his time with Kansas City ran out. I think because he embraced that role and became really good at it, he got another opportunity somewhere else.”

The opportunity wasn’t handed to O’Hearn, even after he arrived in Baltimore in a for-cash trade ahead of the 2023 season. He was designated for assignment, passed through waivers, and he didn’t make the Orioles’ opening day roster.

When the Orioles needed O’Hearn, though, the “opportunity presented itself and he took advantage of it,” Merrifield said. O’Hearn broke out with an .801 OPS in 2023, a .761 OPS in 2024 and received All-Star recognition this season.

None of this shocks Bobby Witt Jr., though. Witt, drafted second overall in 2019, played alongside O’Hearn briefly during the 2021 Triple-A season, and they overlapped in the majors in 2022. In the years since, the longtime Texans hit together in the offseason.

During those hitting sessions, Witt — a two-time All-Star by the time he turned 25 — understood how much work O’Hearn put into maintaining a baseball life.

“He wants to be a winner, and he knew what he had in his tank, what he was able to do,” Witt said. “That’s what makes him so special. You knew he’s an All-Star talent, just with what we saw last year and this year. It’s pretty special.”

Merrifield remains close to O’Hearn. They share a group chat and a similar career arc. Merrifield, who reached three total All-Star Games over his nine-year career, didn’t debut until he was 27. The six-year journey in the minor leagues was arduous, and he and O’Hearn often discussed their perspectives during quiet hours with the Royals.

“We all love grinders,” Merrifield said. “We all love guys who take it on the nose and continue to push forward, and you’re going to have guys who God just says, ‘You’re gonna be great at baseball.’ And there’s a lot of those guys here. And then there’s guys like Ryan O who had to really work for it, and as a guy who was kind of on that side of things, I find a lot more appreciation for the guys that got dragged through the mud a little bit and came out on top.”

And here O’Hearn is, at the top of a sport that never made life easy for him.

“I remember just hoping I’d make my high school baseball team at one point,” O’Hearn said. “And then it was like, ‘Maybe we can play in college.’”

So to become a major league All-Star? To persevere when a way forward was far from clear? O’Hearn earned the Yamazaki whisky on Rubenstein’s private jet. After all the hard years, this is his reward.