A few weeks ago at Camden Yards, Coby Mayo spent several days down the right-field line with three Orioles coaches, relearning how he throws. The work came after a game-ending error in Miami in early May and centered on making his motion shorter, cleaner and less likely to drift when he had time to think.
The timing matters because Mayo had already become the kind of player the Orioles wanted to keep on the field, and the miss in Miami ended a game by allowing the winning run to score. Since that day, Mayo has not recorded an error, which makes the coaching detour look less like a panic move than a fast correction after one play exposed a fault in his routine throws.
Mayo said the intervention was aimed at the throws that ask the most of a defender’s habits rather than his reflexes. His slow rollers and balls coming in had been really good, he said, but the routine ones could get a little long when there was time to think, so he and the coaches spent a few days trying to “reteach the brain.” He used a weighted ball and slowed down his throwing motion while working with assistant pitching coach Mitch Plassmeyer, along with Miguel Cairo and Buck Britton, who oversee the Orioles’ infield defense together.
Plassmeyer’s presence made the work unusual and telling. He is the assistant pitching coach, not an infield instructor, but manager Craig Albernaz said the staff shares ideas freely and that Plassmeyer helps with some of the position players’ throwing. Albernaz called the coaching room egoless and said, “To me, that’s where the magic happens,” a sign that the Orioles were willing to borrow from anywhere if it helped Mayo regain a cleaner motion.
The mechanics behind it were simple enough. Plassmeyer said the goal was to keep Mayo’s body compact and his arm path shorter, then let the rest of the motion happen naturally. “Get that hand up quick and let the body take over and rotate like he normally does,” he said. That fits the problem Mayo described: the throws looked more natural when he had less time, but routine plays with time to think were the ones that had been causing trouble.
What remains unclear is how far the adjustment will carry. Mayo said he and Plassmeyer may have another session later this season to refresh the mechanics, but no date has been set. For now, the Orioles have one cleaner stretch of infield work, one costly error still fresh in memory and one player who appears to have made the first repair before the damage became a season-long issue.
