Heston Kjerstad finally starts Orioles career after dealing with a heart problem

Publish date: 2024-06-05

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — At some point over the past two years, when he’d run out of books to read and TV shows to watch and had twiddled his thumbs to the point of ligament strain, Heston Kjerstad realized he missed it. Not the crack of a home run or the smell of leather, or any of the many facets of the game that inspired romanticism. He missed those, too, but they were obvious objects of longing. He pined not just for the aroma of pine tar but also the unmistakable feeling, now so foreign, of being flat-out exhausted.

Dropping into bed like a load of bricks, out before he hit the pillow. Waking up sore and creaky after a summer spent on your feet. The long, late-night bus rides, during which sleep is achieved only fitfully and in awkward configurations. The even later meals, surrounded by bleary-eyed teammates just as exhausted as you are. All the things that, for two years, his swollen heart had prevented him from enduring.

“That’s the part you embrace,” Kjerstad says. “You’re not going to feel great every day, but you’re at the baseball park.”

Perhaps Kjerstad missed those hallmarks of a hard day of baseball work because he spent so much time being maddeningly idle. The Orioles drafted the former Arkansas slugger with the No. 2 pick on June 10, 2020. He didn’t make his professional debut until exactly two years later. Not long after he signed, doctors diagnosed him with myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle, and forbade him from any strenuous activity. While his fellow draftees began their careers, Kjerstad’s remained parked at the starting line.

But now, the 23-year-old Orioles prospect has finally shifted into gear. Cleared to return to the field this June, he raked his way through Low A, enjoying all the highs the game had to offer. He struggled to find his balance upon a promotion to High A, which greeted him with the struggles and challenges he’d missed. Now he rakes once more, this time in the Arizona Fall League, where his vaunted power stroke has at long last resurfaced.

With every homer he wallops and every line drive he scorches, the frustrations of his two years in purgatory fade further into the recesses of his mind. His focus is trained on the future, where the same climb through the minors that awaited him two years ago still beckons, albeit now on a compressed timeline given his relatively advanced age. The mountain of adversity he scaled is in the past, and it can’t help but appear smaller when viewed from the other side.

He has baseball again — its joys, its pains, even its Nuke LaLoosh-worthy clichés. “We all go through it,” he says, summing up the aggravations of his two years on the shelf. Except what Heston Kjerstad has weathered, almost nobody in baseball has gone through at all.

One day in the fall of 2020, Kjerstad walked into a doctor’s appointment feeling hale and hearty. He walked out with a heart problem.

The news was a shock, to say the least. He’d been ramping up for instructional league, feeling fresh and fit, when a checkup had revealed heart swelling. “I honestly thought maybe one of their tests was wrong,” he says. Elite athletes become adept at running self-diagnostics, and his hadn’t flagged any issues. No shortness of breath, no arrhythmic beating. Even now, he can’t explain why he developed myocarditis. A bout with COVID-19 is a possible cause — instances of athletes developing heart swelling post-infection have become more common — but Kjerstad says he never tested positive nor displayed any symptoms.

The diagnosis trumped his selection as the biggest surprise of the MLB Draft. The 2020 draft had been more unsettled than usual given the onset of the pandemic and cancellation of the NCAA season, and though Kjerstad was considered a surefire first-rounder, few viewed him as the likely second-overall pick. Baseball America ranked him 13th in the class and The Athletic had him 11th — almost certainly destined to be a team’s top prospect but not the franchise-changing talent sometimes available only in the very first picks of the draft.

Then, right after the Tigers selected Arizona State star Spencer Torkelson, the Orioles submitted his name. Though the Orioles signed him for a significantly below-slot bonus, using the savings to overpay a few prospects later in what was an unusually abbreviated five-round draft, general manager Mike Elias insisted that Kjerstad was their guy. They liked his ability to hit for power, with 17 homers as a sophomore at Arkansas and six in just 16 games as a junior before the season shut down. They felt more confident in his plate discipline and contact ability than others in the industry. Kjerstad may have come more cheaply, but he was a talent worthy of such a high pick.

That’s a hypothesis that most draftees begin to prove or disprove immediately, but Kjerstad would have to wait. The best course of treatment for young myocarditis patients, he learned, is patience. No baseball, doctor’s orders. But if a heart problem wasn’t going to get him, cabin fever might. For months, he bounced between Baltimore and the team’s spring facility in Florida. He finished his degree online — Recreation and Sports Management, the former of which he was now prohibited from experiencing — and read a bunch of books. He doesn’t recall their titles, having lost them in that gray blur of monotony.

“Dude, I went through it,” he says. “There were times when you’d just get drove nuts. You want to do stuff.”

Sitting still makes one an easy target, and life batted him around like a plaything. His myocarditis went away in the spring of 2021, only to recur just as Kjerstad was set to begin his first professional season. That knocked him out until August, at which point too little time remained on the calendar for him to debut. So, he spent the offseason preparing his body and his swing, eyes fixed on 2022, only to tear a hamstring chasing a flyball this March.

At least that one made sense. When he moved his leg, it hurt. When he did his prescribed rehab exercises, it got better. “The hamstring I felt I had more control over,” he says, and control had been a rare commodity ever since he turned pro. If anything, his experiences had taught him to not fret about its absence.

After missing a whole year, what were another few months?

When he was finally cleared to play, with a healthy heart and a healed hamstring, Kjerstad was 23 years old. When he debuted with Low-A Delmarva in June, he hadn’t taken a swing in a real game in more than two years, and he was older than the average player in the league by the same margin. He might have been physically more mature, but everyone else had been playing baseball more recently. No one was sure how he’d perform against real competition. After appearing on top-100 prospect lists following the draft, his extended absence from the field had knocked him off.

Then, he singled in his third plate appearance and “just felt like I was home again.”

Heston Kjerstad logs his first pro hit!

The 2020 No. 2 overall Draft pick goes the other way on a base hit for the @shorebirds.

Watch the @Orioles prospect live: https://t.co/8eR0ak7puG pic.twitter.com/o0xqvIv9AX

— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) June 11, 2022

It’s hard to know what to make of the half-season Kjerstad has been able to play, although the Orioles have pushed him to make up for lost time. Kjerstad outclassed Low A within 22 games, hitting .463 and earning a promotion to High-A Aberdeen. (From Shorebird to IronBird.) There, the going got rough. Through his first 35 games, Kjerstad batted just .220. More concerning, given his reputation as a power hitter, he slugged only .333. By September, however, his bat began to warm. In the season’s final month, he hit .278 with a .785 OPS. His slugging percentage jumped 130 points.

Kjerstad continued to hit in Aberdeen’s brief playoff run — Baltimore hitting coordinator Anthony Villa remembers the left-handed slugger crushing extra-base hits both to left-center and down the line in right — and he’s been all but unstoppable in the fall league. His 1.009 OPS was tied for fifth in the league through Tuesday and his five home runs, including one of the inside-the-park variety, were tied for first. That’s as many as he hit in 65 regular-season games. On Saturday, he’ll participate in the league’s inaugural home run derby.

He appears to be the same hitter he was two years ago, when he was considered perhaps the second-best college bat in the draft, as if he’d only just now been removed from the packaging. His swing remains “a little unorthodox,” as Villa describes it. Kjerstad stands tall in the box, lifting his front leg and placing all the weight on the other as the pitch approaches. His upper body tilts slightly back toward the catcher, an uphill posture that no hitting coach would teach. But for Kjerstad, it works.

He hits the ball hard, and often. “There’s a rare skill of guys who can really compress the ball on the right part of the barrel,” says Cody Asche, a hitting coordinator in the Orioles system recently promoted to their major-league staff. “Some guys can hit the ball hard and some guys can really hit it at good angles. Some guys swing really fast.”

Kjerstad’s swing isn’t textbook, but who says it needs to be? “Man, when I watch Heston,” Asche says, “he just squares the ball up a little bit differently.” Kjerstad may not be maxing out at 116 mph, like Cardinals top prospect and fellow fall-leaguer Jordan Walker, but Asche says the slugger frequently makes good contact.

On the fall league’s opening night, he did just that, crushing a seventh-inning homer that left the bat at 110 mph and landed 424 feet away. “You can’t beat a home run, jogging the bases, watching it go over the fence,” he says.

You know what, maybe that’s what he missed the most.

Kjerstad still has lots of development ahead of him.

While he sat patiently on the launch pad waiting for clear weather, the other stars of the Baltimore farm system blasted off through the ranks. Adley Rutschman, who is a year older than Kjerstad, cracked the majors this year. So did Gunnar Henderson, who is two years younger. Two other notable position players taken by Baltimore in that same 2020 draft — college shortstop Jordan Westburg and prep infielder Coby Mayo — have advanced further up the minor-league ladder than Kjerstad has.

The Orioles want to help Kjerstad “play a little bit of catch-up,” says farm director Matt Blood, but if the outfielder has learned anything since turning pro, it’s the value of patience. Baseball evaluators can fixate on a player’s age — how old he is when he’s drafted, when he’ll hit his physical prime, when he’ll begin to decline — but it’s not as if Kjerstad can unwind time and become 21 again. He can only push forward, as quickly as is practical.

“In life, we put too much on ourselves by saying, ‘I want to be at this goal by this age or this day,’” he says. “You force it more than you should. If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen at some point. You’ve just got to keep striving for it.”

Next season, his first full professional campaign, figures to be a crucial one for Kjerstad nonetheless, but after so much waiting, it does feel nice to strive again. Every player confronts adversity, he’s quick to note, but not often in the manner he has. Not usually given to public self-reflection, Kjerstad can’t help but dabble in it when considering all he’s withstood. “Even my worst day out here, “he says, “is still an enjoyable day just playing baseball.”

Those days are dwindling, at least for 2022. There is just more than a week left in the fall schedule, meaning another months-long existence without baseball awaits. But this time, Kjerstad will settle onto his couch with a feeling of accomplishment. His body will ache, stiff and bruised after months of a grinding baseball season.

It will feel terrific.

(Photo: Tom Priddy / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)

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Heston Kjerstad finally starts Orioles career after dealing with a heart problem