If anyone's wondering how the Baltimore Orioles are still winning games even after offloading two of their best players at the Aug. 2 trade deadline, there's at least one good explanation.

In Adley Rutschman, they have arguably the best catcher in Major League Baseball right now.

This is to say that the 24-year-old Rutschman is becoming what he was foretold to be when the Orioles drafted him at No. 1 overall in 2019. People were slapping Buster Posey comparisons on him left and right, and they stuck as he debuted as a consensus top-five prospect in 2020 and ascended to the top spot in Baseball America's rankings for 2022.

As they kinda-sorta-not-really say, with great hype comes great responsibility to immediately live up to it. Rutschman did in the sense that he was in the majors by May 21 even after his spring was sidetracked by a strained triceps, but he mostly ate a diet of humble pie as he hit .176 with no home runs through his first 20 games as an Oriole.

Then in his 21st game on June 15, the 6'2", 220-pound switch-hitter finally got off the schneid with his first long ball.

Things haven't been the same for Rutschman and the Orioles since then.

The Oregon State product has accumulated a .919 OPS, seven home runs and he's tied for the most fWAR of any American League hitter not named Aaron Judge since June 15. The Orioles lost on that date but got started on a 34-20 run on June 16. Among AL clubs, only the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners have won more games in this span.

Perhaps unfairly, the Orioles still only have a 2.6 percent chance of making the playoffs by FanGraphs' reckoning. Yet given how far they've come after losing 100-plus games in each of the last three full seasons and just how much Rutschman has to do with it, the man surely deserves at least some down-ballot love in the AL MVP voting.

This is, of course, assuming he doesn't fade down the stretch. But that doesn't seem likely, as he only seems to be getting more comfortable with each game he plays.