A Birdland Salute to Austin Hays

He was drafted. He played. He is Birdland.

In a past era of the Orioles, when a player who had contributed to multiple fun teams departed in trade or as a free agent, I offered a Birdland Salute. This custom was initially extended to 2012 and 2014 O’s. On the occasion of Austin Hays being traded away, I have decided that players from 2022 and 2023 (and hopefully, by the time the season ends, also 2024) should receive the same honor.

If you’re not a long-time Camden Chat reader who remembers these the first time around, the inspiration for this is a combination of the bar wakes in The Wire and memorials for members of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones. If neither of these references make sense to you, you can just post NERDS.gif in the comments.

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Austin Hays had been an Oriole for so long that he has been around for three different eras of the team. He arrived in the majors towards the end of the 2017 season, when there was hope that he might just provide that team a spark down the stretch. He re-emerged towards the end of the 2019 season to get in on the tanking era, he was still here in 2022 when fortunes turned, he was an All-Star for a team that won the AL East in 2023.

That’s a lot of years that he’s been on the mind for Orioles fans, really going back to when he was drafted in the third round of 2017 by the previous O’s front office regime. Hays positively raced to the majors, something that’s rare enough for first round picks, let alone third round picks.

Hays crushed 16 home runs in 64 games for what was then the High-A affiliate in Frederick, another 16 home runs in 64 games for Double-A Bowie in his first pro season. This was genuinely impressive stuff and it’s little surprise that the Orioles, with some room in the outfield, gave him a chance at the end of that 2017 season. There are baseball writers who will to this day toss out snark about Buck Showalter’s stubbornness about not playing Hays.

I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is that Hays struggled out of the gate, hitting just .217/.238/.317 in 20 games after getting that call-up. The next year, he couldn’t duplicate his efforts and didn’t even get up to the big leagues even as the Orioles fell into oblivion. Hays was injured and ineffective through the 2018 season and could have easily ended up as the next incarnation of a Nolan Reimold type of career where we always wondered what might have been.

Hays, to his credit, made it back, even when his 2019 campaign saw him deal with enough injuries that he had to have multiple rehab stints through A-ball. Another September brought him back to an Orioles team with much different fortunes, and this second taste of MLB finally took. Hays OPSed .947 across 21 games for that sad-sack team and since he was still just 23, he could go into the pile of guys who might hang around until things were better.

One of the finer individual plays that I’ve ever seen an Orioles outfielder make came during that 2019 season-ending stint:

(The sound wasn’t working on this video last night, so if you are experiencing that also, it’s not just you. The visual gets the point across too.)

It’s late 2019, so there are no fans at all in the two nearby sections as Hays goes full extension to pull off the robbery. Might as well get himself pumped up about it. How could you not want him to make it after that?

Even two and a half years ago, there was no way to know that Hays would do it. He could have ended up in DJ Stewart territory. Or, if the 2022 Orioles had not started showing substantial improvement, Hays could have gone the other way and ended up being one of the last guys to get traded for prospects. He hit the sweet spot and the team was good before he had used up too much of his pre-free agency time, and he was good as the Orioles improved.

Although Hays’s best season here was 2021, he was a big part of the 2022 revival and 2023 continued improvement. The team could factor him in to its season planning on into the start of this season, and he delivered with two years of slightly better than league average batting and competent corner outfield defense for Orioles teams that really went somewhere.

After all the guys we saw shuffle through from 2018 through the first couple of months of 2022, no good player should be taken for granted ever again. He was one of four All-Stars a year ago. Hays has been a good Oriole, even if his last 365 days have seen him drop off offensively and defensively, such that fans were clamoring to see younger players instead.

In the final tally, Hays batted .262/.314/.433 across 557 games for the franchise that drafted him. That’s a 107 OPS+ or 103 wRC+, depending on which adjusted stat you like, and either 9.6 bWAR or 7.1 fWAR. He will not make the next update to the top 50 greatest Orioles in history, but he is a player we can all fondly remember from what we hope is just the start of a great era of O’s baseball.

Hays was drafted. He played. He is Birdland. We shall never see his like again.