As Olson Goes, So Go the Orioles

Is he the Baltimore Orioles’ Most Valuable Player? Is he the Rookie of the Year in the American League? Has a 22-year-old closer ever pitched so well for a contending team? Will he ever throw a 1-2-3 inning? Would the Orioles be within 10 games of first place without him?

Questions, questions, questions. Gregg Olson is raising a lot of questions these days. He is back in form, you see, back from the brief trip to the water closet that he and his curveball took a month or so ago, at which time, not coincidentally, the Orioles fell in the mud and almost forgot to get up.

But now he is back and so are the Orioles. Yes, it is happening again. Again and again and again. Olson arrives from the bullpen in the eighth or ninth inning. Close game. He pitches into trouble. He pitches out of trouble. The Orioles win.

These days, as in the first four months of the season, this script seems as much a certainty as the passing of the hours -- tick, tock, tick, tock -- and there is not another player on the Orioles’ roster whose performance has more impact on whether the team is switched-on or fuzzy-wuzzy.

Not Ripken or Ballard or Tettleton. No. If you want to chart the decline and ascension of these Orioles, watch Olson. “I don’t know where we would be without him,” Manager Frank Robinson said Tuesday night after Olson had set an American League single-season record for saves by a rookie, recording his 24th in a 3-1 defeat of the Cleveland Indians at Memorial Stadium.

It was a typical piece of Olson work. He replaced Bob Milacki with one out in the eighth inning and a runner on first base, and, after getting the second out, he gave up a single. “He isn’t a traditional closer,” Robinson said, smiling. “He keeps it interesting.”

That meant there were runners on first and second, Pete O’Brien up. No problem. Olson struck him out to end the inning. In the ninth, he struck out the first batter, Cory Snyder, and induced Brook Jacoby to hit an easy groundball to second baseman Tim Hulett. But the ball went between Hulett’s legs, Jacoby reaching first. Olson then threw five straight balls, putting another runner on base in the process.

But he got out of it. He always gets out of it. Olson has not been perfect this season, but he has been close. He has been put into 28 save situations through the long season, and he has converted all but four of them, including the first 15 and the last six in a row.

The message is all too clear. Except for that one slump in late July, when he forgot how to throw the curveball that has carried him to the major leagues and now the record book at age 22, he has been too tough for the American League. For the worst teams. For the best teams. For the worst hitters. For the best hitters. Too tough.

“In November I can sit down and enjoy it,” he said Tuesday night. “If I stopped and thought about it all right now, though, that would be the worst thing I could do. As soon as you do that, you start messing up. The record is great, just a great thing, but what good is it going to do for me the rest of the season?”

Closers are a fragile lot, of course, baseball’s high-wire men, their psyches in constant need of attention. Every pitch they throw is laden with pressure, a game hanging on it. The Minnesota Twins’ Jeff Reardon, one of the best, once said that he was terrified every time he went out, and that any closer who said he wasn’t, was lying. It is not a job for boys, certainly not rookies, which means, of course, that Olson is no less than a marvel.

He is a kid, a should-be college senior, pitching almost perfectly out of the bullpen -- he is unscored on in his last 12 appearances -- in the middle of a hot pennant race. When it is time to vote for Rookie of the Year, he will get his share of votes. So will the Kansas City Royals’ Tom Gordon, winner of 16 games. Those are the two candidates. Olson could well win it.

Games such as Tuesday night’s are the reason why. After Olson pitched into trouble in the ninth, with runners on first and second and one out and two other relievers warming up in the bullpen, pitching coach Al Jackson came out of the dugout and walked to the mound.

“Throw a strike,” Jackson said to Olson.

Sage advice.

Olson threw a fastball to pinch-hitter Mike Young, who swung and popped up to third baseman Craig Worthington. Up came the Indians’ leadoff hitter, Jerry Browne, a .300 hitter. But Olson worked him to two strikes, then looped past him a curveball delicious enough to eat, ending the game.

It was his curve that deserted him a month ago, when he suddenly blew three of four save chances, throwing 17 balls in 21 pitches in one appearance. “I had let something slip,” he said. “It was something mechanical, one of those little things you don’t even notice because the season is so long and you’re playing every day and don’t notice subtle changes. Someone told me about it. I forget who. And everything has been fine ever since. Just fine.”