In the spring of 2020, Orioles reliever Hunter Harvey was in bed around 11 p.m. when he heard music blaring from the living room of his rental condo in Sarasota, Fla.
He assumed his roommate and close buddy, Ryan Mountcastle, was entertaining a bunch of people. Harvey opened the door of his room and peered out.
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And Mountcastle, one of the brightest spots in the Orioles’ current rebuild and a 2021 American League Rookie of the Year candidate, was alone.
Belting out Creed’s “Arms Wide Open,” to the wireless microphone in his hand.
Mountcastle’s karaoke machine hummed. His portable speaker blared.
“He’s standing there, eyes closed, just getting after it like he’s putting on a concert. And the more I looked, there wasn’t a single person in that living room,” Harvey said. “I mean, he was getting full into it. He’s leaning over, leaning back, eyes closed.”
It took Harvey a minute to process the scene.
“You’re just a goofy dude,” Harvey said he told Mountcastle. “I was just rolling. It had to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen him do.”
When you watch the 24-year-old first baseman/designated hitter in the batter’s box, he’s all business. Mountcastle’s bright blue eyes are fixated on the pitcher, trying to unlock what’s coming.
When he’s in postgame Zoom interviews, he’s polite but cautious. Doesn’t say much.
There’s a “wicked sense of humor” lurking under the quiet persona, however, his mom says. An undeniable goofiness, his girlfriend declares. Just wait for it, everyone says.
“I think Ryan will come out at some point and show you his personality when he gets more comfortable,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “He’s a fun guy. He’s fun. He’s loose.
“He’s a big kid in a lot of ways.”
Mountcastle always has gone at his own pace. On his own terms.
“He was slow to get up or walk or do anything when he was an itty, bitty baby. His sister walked at 10 months, but he was my slow-moving train,” said Michelle Lindstrom, Mountcastle’s mother. “He’s been a really easygoing kid pretty much all the way through. As far as being a normal kid, I don’t think he ever really was.”
He’s always danced to his own karaoke beat.
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At age 3, Mountcastle’s favorite TV show was ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” He’d watch for hours.
“He would be invited to his friends’ birthday parties when he was young, and they would play Yu-Gi-Oh cards or Pokémon and stuff like that,” Lindstrom said. “But Ryan was never into that stuff. You’d find him downstairs watching a football game with the adult men. And he was just a little kid.”
His father, Steve, a former collegiate golfer at George Mason University, had plastic clubs in his son’s hands shortly after he could walk. When the young boy started playing baseball, father and son would watch televised games and predict what pitches were coming.
By 11, his family knew Mountcastle had a special talent. He began playing on travel teams in the baseball hotbed of Central Florida. He’d stick with one until his talent outgrew the level and he’d move up to another.
Heading into ninth grade, Mountcastle had a decision to make. His parents were divorced and lived in different school districts. He split time between both homes, so he could pick his high school. Going to Hagerty High School in Oviedo, Fla., meant not knowing almost anyone. But it also meant playing baseball for Hagerty’s well-connected head coach Jered Goodwin, who ran one of the top travel clubs in the country.
The quiet kid chose the better baseball route, met his best friends for life and ultimately became a first-round pick of the Orioles (36th overall) in 2015.
“He just wound up with a great group of friends there,” Steve Mountcastle said. “For me, that was a godsend to have that situation.”
The joke within the Mountcastle-Lindstrom clan is that they’re the modern-day Brady Bunch, except there are four parents and five kids.
Steve Mountcastle and Lindstrom — who, coincidentally, were Orioles fans when they met in the early 1990s while living in Northern Virginia — divorced when Ryan was 3 and his sister, Kelly, was 5.
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Steve Mountcastle then married a woman with two boys about the same ages as Ryan and Kelly. Lindstrom also remarried and had another son, Kyle, who is now 13. The families lived 15 minutes apart in Florida. Steve and Michelle co-parented, putting any differences aside to concentrate on their kids.
“I have family events and they’ll both be there,” Ryan Mountcastle said. “It’s actually really cool. You don’t see that a lot with divorced parents being really cordial. It has been a blessing. Less stress on me, less drama.”
Just a few extra chairs needed every time the Orioles invite Mountcastle’s family to Baltimore.
“It’s kind of a running joke. Whenever Ryan wins an award, the Orioles always have to get an additional four or five or 10 tickets, because we are such a huge family that we take up half of one of the boxes up there,” Lindstrom said. “He just has a lot of family that loves him.”
That was quite evident last August when Mountcastle made his major-league debut. No one could attend because of COVID-19 restrictions at Camden Yards, so the Orioles presented him with a video of well-wishes from back home in Oviedo, just outside Orlando.
It lasted 2 minutes, 30 seconds. Eighteen people — and Mountcastle’s dog — were featured.
Maybe it takes a village to raise a big leaguer. Or to keep him positive. That happened earlier this year while Mountcastle was struggling through the roughest hitting stretch of his pro career. There was no shortage of support.
“I think that everybody who was there for him when he struggled in the beginning (of 2021), I think everyone sending him positive feedback — ‘Keep your head up. Keep going.’ — I think that really did make a difference,” said Taylor Scalora, Mountcastle’s girlfriend of eight years.
The rubber bracelet on his left wrist is all you need to know about Mountcastle and his loyalty — which his friends and family say is one of his most endearing traits.
He’s been wearing the bracelet for four years now. The original one, which was green, snapped with constant wear a year ago. He replaced it with a red one that contains the same message: “Rest in peace, Austin. We’ll never forget you. Always in our hearts.”
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Austin Ekern played football at Hagerty and graduated with Mountcastle and Scalora. He was 20 and about to begin his junior year at Florida State University in August 2017, when, as a pedestrian, he was struck and killed by a pickup truck.
Mountcastle was in Double-A Bowie, away from his friends and family. It was a difficult time.
“I’ve been wearing it ever since he passed,” Mountcastle said. “Obviously, it sucks. Going through that was not easy. But I always wear it to remind me that life’s short. And try to have fun with it.”
Not many know the bracelet’s significance. But those who do appreciate Mountcastle’s commitment to his late friend.
“Austin’s mom has seen that Ryan wears it, and she’s realized how important that is to Ryan,” Scalora said. “It’s really cool for her to see that every day and, at the level Ryan’s at now, for him to still wear that is just really cool.”
Despite the seven-figure signing bonus and his ascending big-league career, Mountcastle is still the hometown boy from Oviedo.
“He’s kind of been the same goofy guy I met 10 years ago,” said Casey Crawford, who played second base to Mountcastle’s shortstop in high school. “All the success he’s had hasn’t changed him at all.”
In fact, Mountcastle is still dating his first girlfriend.
He and Scalora had some classes together freshman year and he sought her out for extra help with math. They began dating at the end of their sophomore year.
“Honestly, ever since then, we’ve just been inseparable through everything,” said Scalora, who is now a wedding coordinator at a Florida venue.
They’re building a house together, which should be completed this fall.
Crawford, a medical device salesman, is moving in with Mountcastle and Scalora once the house is completed.
The home will be the center of offseason activities for the couple’s tight group of friends— the site of game nights and Sunday football gatherings, where a lot of fantasy football trash talk commences.
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It’ll be the place to gather — except on Thursday nights. That’s bowling night for Mountcastle and his buddies. It’s tradition. Six or more guys get together at the local alley, split into teams and compete intensely — with the losers having to pick up the winners’ bowling tab.
“Every Thursday. It’s a thing. It’s marked on the calendar,” Scalora said, laughing. “Do not interrupt the bowling at 9 o’clock on Thursdays. Same with fantasy football on Sundays. He won’t get off the couch.”
Enough about loyalty. How about that other word that keeps coming up when loved ones describe Mountcastle?
Goofball.
“I’m just an idiot,” Mountcastle said. “I just do stupid things and people think it’s funny.”
Especially when he gets a microphone in his hand. He’s not sure how his love for karaoke started, but it’s genuine. He’s got his own machine and a large speaker he totes around. He has a stable of go-to songs: “I Miss You,” by blink-182, “Walking in Memphis” by Marc Cohn, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, and, of course, Creed’s “Arms Wide Open.”
“He’s not bad,” Harvey said. “It goes back to him just being good at every frickin’ thing he does. But for some reason, he’s not that bad at singing.”
It’s not a unanimous opinion.
“I don’t know if I agree with that one. That’s a little bromance comment,” Scalora said of Harvey’s music critique. “I mean, Ryan’s not the worst.”
For Mountcastle, microphones aren’t just for singing. Every New Year’s Eve, his mother hosts a party of 50 to 60 people, a mix of her friends and her children’s friends. At some point during the night, Mountcastle becomes emcee.
He picks out a partygoer and spontaneously concocts an introductory bio as the rest of the crowd chants the person’s name. The guest of honor then downs a drink, everyone cheers and Mountcastle chooses a new subject. It can go on for hours.
“We’re spitting our drinks out laughing the whole time. Because it’s so ridiculous,” his mother said. “He is super quiet, but you put a microphone in his hand, and he’ll go to town. That’s Ryan. You just never know what you’re going to get.”
You also don’t know who he is going to connect with. The easygoing Mountcastle seemingly gets along with everyone, but the guy in the Orioles organization he’s bonded with the most is Harvey, also a former first-rounder. They share a love of baseball, video games and competitions of any sort. But they also appear to be opposites: the clean-cut kid from suburban Orlando and the mullet-sporting country boy from North Carolina.
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“It’s hilarious to me,” Steve Mountcastle said. “Hunter likes to get up early, go hunting and fishing. Ryan is gonna sleep in until noon or until someone comes and wakes him up. Hunter is wearing camo. Ryan’s wearing Lululemon. Just two different guys, but they really enjoy each other’s company.”
The differences aren’t lost on Harvey, who has missed most of the 2021 season due to injury.
“Ryan likes all the city stuff or suburbs. I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want to live near people,” Harvey said. “But when me and him are together, it’s just two dumb guys hanging out with each other, always cutting up. When me and him get together, it’s like we’re dang 12 years old again, and it drives my fiancée and his girlfriend crazy.”
After hitting .333 with an .878 OPS in 35 games with the Orioles in 2020, Mountcastle was primed for a huge 2021 season. He’d have an everyday starting spot and, with his rookie status still intact, a shot at the AL Rookie of the Year Award.
Then things went horribly wrong. In his first 25 games of this season, Mountcastle hit .198 with only one homer and 30 strikeouts in 96 plate appearances. By May 14, he was still struggling; a .212 batting average and a .565 OPS.
Orioles management said all the right things publicly, but privately there were concerns. Mountcastle was being counted on to be one of the primary faces of the Orioles’ rebuild and he was lost. How long could they give him to turn it around?
Harvey was rehabbing in the minor leagues when one of the farmhands asked if he thought Mountcastle might get demoted.
“I’m like, ‘That’s the thing you don’t know about Mountcastle. You all think he is struggling and he’s gonna get all mental and it’s gonna bother him. Just wait. He’s gonna turn around,’” Harvey said. “He doesn’t struggle for long, because he just figures stuff out so easily.”
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Harvey has said the same thing to his buddy, just with a slightly different twist.
“I’ve said to him, ‘You’re just so dumb and goofy you don’t get mad at yourself because you don’t even know any better. You don’t overthink it because you don’t got nothing up there to think with,’” Harvey joked. “I’ve told him that many times.”
By mid-May, Mountcastle began to click. In 26 June games, he hit nine homers, drove in 26 runs and had an OPS of 1.015. His August was just as scorching, eight homers and a 1.183 OPS. With one game remaining in the 2021 season, Mountcastle has slashed .255/.310/.799. His 33 homers are the most for a rookie in Orioles history and only 15 rookies in the game ever have hit more homers than Mountcastle has in 2021.
“I was digging myself out of a hole for a while. Just being where I’m at now, I am proud of the season I’ve had,” Mountcastle said. “I think that first month really taught me a lot.”
It also has sparked some belated recognition. He’s now in the conversation for Rookie of the Year, although he appears to be behind such other well-regarded rookies as Tampa Bay’s Randy Arozarena and Wander Franco in a race without a clear favorite. Maybe it’s the slow start or playing in obscurity on a bad team that has kept Mountcastle from leapfrogging everyone.
“I think he has been lost because of our record and maybe we’re not on national TV as much. I don’t know,” Hyde said. “I don’t know what the answer is. But I do think that he should be heavily considered for that award for what he has done. And he has my vote.”
Mountcastle would love to become the first Orioles player to win the award since reliever Gregg Olson in 1989. But, like most things, he’s not gonna sweat it.
“To win it would be super cool. And just to be mentioned with all these great rookies this year would be really cool as well,” Mountcastle said. “Whatever happens, I’m gonna take this season and be grateful for it and move on to the next one.”
First, though, he’ll head back home to Florida.
He’s got bowling with his buddies on Thursday night.
(Top photo: Joy R. Absalon)