After a 24-2 beatdown at the hands of the apparently mighty Cincinnati Reds the Orioles sit at 9-12 on the season which is good for 4th place in the AL East. The O’s have put me in an interesting spot where I look at the 9-12 record and I know it’s bad but it’s not as bad as it feels.
If you took the average Orioles fan and asked them how the team was doing they would say horrible, they’re done, it’s over and after watching the game on Sunday those feelings are completely understandable but as it stands right now the Orioles are 2.5 games out of a playoff spot so at the very least mathematically it is far from over.
If the O’s were 2.5 games out of a playoff spot at the trade deadline we’d be saying buy! buy! Buy! but here we are 21 games into the season 141 games left to be played and it feels like the dream is dead.
Why is that?
There’s lots of reasons but in part it is because of the many ways to end up at 9-12 the Orioles have chosen a particularly demoralizing path.
If the Orioles had been sitting at 9-9 going into the weekend and been swept by an elite team like the Dodgers they would be viewed differently than they are today. You could make the argument “Well we’re not as good as the Dodgers but besides that we’re an ok team.”
If the Orioles were 9-12 but had lost 4 or 5 games because the bullpen blew them in the late innings that would feel like a very different 9-12. You could say “Once the bullpen get’s right we’ll start winning those close games and we’ll be ok.”
Instead the Orioles have gotten to 9-12 in a way where it feels like how they’re winning is unsustainable and how they’re losing is very sustainable. It feels like they are not 9-12 in a way that will be funny to look back on but rather are the kind of 9-12 that will turn into 18-24 and then 27-36 and eventually 70-92.
So how can the Orioles turn things around? We’ll have to start by diagnosing the issue.
Sometimes a patient comes into a hospital and the doctors have a hard time diagnosing their problem. Either their symptoms don’t match up with what’s on wikipedia or they are not responding well to medication so the doctor has a real puzzle on their hands.
Other times someone comes running into the ER with a blood soaked bandage covering their arm and they yell “SOMEONE CUT OFF MY HAND WITH A MACHETE!” and it’s pretty easy to diagnose them with an aggressive case of hand cut off by macheteitis.
Like my hypothetical machete victim, the Orioles main problem this season is not hard to diagnose. They have the worst rotation in all of baseball.
Here is where the Orioles starts rank across many of the important pitching stats
Innings pitched: 28
ERA: 30
FIP: 30
xFIP: 28
K/9: 30
HR/9: 30
fWAR: 30
Dollars/WAR: 30
K/BB: 25
AVG: 29
WHIP: 29
ERA-: 30
FIP-: 30
Exit Velo: 28
Barrels: 28
Hard Hit Balls: 30
Keep in mind that the Rockies are basically a sideshow attraction for a downtown brewery and the White Sox are the worst team of all time so to be worse than those 2 teams in almost every relevant pitching stat is an unmitigated disaster. This is the kind of rotation that gets you Adley Rutschman in the draft.
Those numbers don’t even tell the whole story because there are 3 good Zach Eflin starts in there and right now Zach Eflin is not even in the rotation so today’s rotation is worse than what the season numbers would suggest.
The rotation has hurt the team in a multitude of ways. In 12 of the Orioles 21 games this season their starting pitcher has either pitched fewer than 5 innings or given up 5+ runs and in many of those games they’ve done both and again when you look at that number, 12/21, keep in mind that Zach Eflin accounts for 3 of the good starts so with the current guys it’s 12/18.
The Orioles are regularly down 4+ runs before everyone even has a chance to hit and their bullpen has to pitch 5+ innings almost every single game. Their current rotation is putting the Orioles in position to lose 66% percent of the time!
The bullpen deserves a ton of credit for the fact that the Orioles aren’t battling with the White Sox for the worst record in the league. On the odd occasion that the starters have been able to give the bullpen the ball with a lead, the bullpen has done a great job holding onto leads even though they are being asked to come in starting in the fifth or earlier almost every single game.
That kind of usage is just not sustainable. You cannot make a bullpen pitch more than the starters and expect them to last through the season. Either injuries will set in or performance will dip but the bullpen cannot continue to carry the rotation for much longer before the dam bursts and we start seeing blow up innings from an overworked bullpen.
Things are not going to get better if the Orioles just sit and wait. There is no version of this season where the Orioles are warming up for their first playoff game and the commentators are saying “The Orioles were smart not to panic after a slow start and now Brandon Young and Cade Povich are 2 of the best starters in the American League!”
Grayson Rodriguez is getting second opinions on his shoulders and guys don’t get second opinions on healthy shoulders. I would be surprised if we saw Grayson Rodriguez in the 2025 season.
Zach Eflin will be back but he’ll have to baby his shoulder for a few starts and even then we’ve seen that 1 good Zach Eflin start a week isn’t enough to keep this team’s head above water.
Kyle Bradish could be back at the end of the year but guys coming back from Tommy John need a soft landing. It’s not fair to expect him to come back and immediately be the guy he was when he went down with injury.
Tyler Wells was well on his way to becoming a bullpen arm before his injury and I don’t think major surgery is going to reverse that trajectory.
If Chayce McDermott or Trevor Rogers recover from their injuries and get called up they are going to fit right in with this current rotation because those guys feel like a guaranteed 4 innings pitched 4 ER at the major league level.
Going through this list of internal options makes the Orioles plan for starting pitching seem incredibly foolish. Yes there were injuries but they basically put the weight of the world on Grayson Rodriguez’s arm and as soon as he went down they were in a bad place.
Anyway we’ll get to some finger pointing later, right now I need to stay in solutions mode.
The first thing that needs to happen is Kyle Gibson needs to come up and Charlie Morton needs to move to the bullpen as a mop up guy. Keep Poteet as the 5th starter and DFA Cionel Perez.
Just typing this out made me depressed that this is where the Orioles are but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step or something like that.
Hopefully Poteet only needs to make 1 start before Eflin comes back and then he goes back to triple A when Eflin gets reinstated. So the Orioles enter the month of May with a rotation of Eflin, Sugano, Kremer, Gibson and Povich.
May is an incredibly important month for the Orioles this season. Here are there opponents:
vs Kansas City
@ Minnesota
@ Los Angeles (Angels)
vs Minnesota
vs Washington
@ Milwaukee
@ Boston
vs St. Louis
vs Chicago (White Sox)
They will play 28 games against very beatable opponents and as long as the Orioles don’t lose every game from now until the start of May if they take care of business during this stretch they can come out with a winning record and if you have a winning record at the end of May in the American league you are going to be in contention for one of the three wild card spots.
If Cade Povich and Dean Kremer both turn it around and pitch to high 3/low 4 ERAs at this point AND Gibson is good when he gets the call then they MAY be able to be ok pitching through May with that rotation but that is a lot of variables that have to all go in the Orioles favor. So here is the key element of my save the Orioles season plan:
If the Orioles want to stop this year from becoming a wasted season then they need to make a trade to upgrade their rotation before this critical stretch of games.
Obviously early season trades are uncommon but with how the Orioles rotation has looked so far and the clock ticking on the Orioles position player talent I don’t see how the Orioles front office can procrastinate making their move until the trade deadline.
The trade deadline is fueled by teams giving up on their playoff dreams and selling off their players to try to bolster up a future roster but this early in the season not many teams are willing to wave the white flag on the season less than a quarter of the way through the year so when the Orioles get on the phones to try to save their rotation they’re going to have a short list of teams to call.
The Marlins
The Marlins are the most obvious matchup for an Orioles trade. They were the ones that dealt Luis Arraez to the Padres last early last season so clearly their front office is willing to get weird. Peter Bendix is on a mission to rebuild this roster and he already beat up on Mike Elias in a trade once so I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see a Baltimore area code pop up on his phone again.
The big prize on the Marlins is Sandy Alcantara who is expected to be the big fish of the trade deadline this year. Sandy has gotten off to a slow start so far this year but what’s important is that the velo and the spin are all in line from his pre Tommy John numbers so any team that acquires him should be able to expect that he’ll return to being a top of the rotation starter by the end of the season but even if he were to top out as a middle of the rotation arm this year he’d be better than almost anyone the Orioles could dream of giving the ball to.
Every contender in the league will be wanting to get their hands on Alcantara so the Orioles would have to part with some serious pieces in order to convince the Marlins that trading Alcantara early is better than waiting for the trade deadline when they could get a proper bidding war started.
We know that Elias doesn’t like to give away his top prospects but I feel like after the offseason he just experienced trying to get his hands on some pitching he might value being able to get a good pitcher locked up at 17 million dollars AAV for the next 3 years.
The Orioles are paying Charlie Morton almost that same amount to be the worst starter I’ve ever seen and if they don’t make a trade for an Alcantara type they’ll be searching for another stop gap pitcher to give 15 million to next year. Why not send over a prospect package to Miami and get Alcantara on a bargain deal.
With how in demand Alcantara will be this summer I wouldn’t blame the Marlins for shutting down any premature conversations about him but that doesn’t mean the Orioles should give up.
The Marlins also have Max Meyer if the Orioles wanted to try to do a young guy for young guy deal. Ryan Weathers will be back around the first week of May if the Marlins wanted to sell high on a guy that has looked good in a small sample size and Edward Cabrera is an interesting arm who likely wouldn’t cost the Orioles hardly anything.
Any one of these guys would be a big upgrade for the O’s.
The Twins
The Twins have not been shy about wanting to reduce their payroll and they are off to a dreadful start of the season after a dreadful last half of 2024 (sound familiar) so now could be an opportunity to relieve them of that expensive Pablo Lopez contract.
The same thing I said about Elias realizing how hard it is to get pitching on a team friendly deal when it comes to acquiring Sandy applies here. 21 million dollars per year for a pitcher as good as Lopez is a steal and you’d have him through the end of 2027 which is when you would supposedly have to start planning to pay guys like Gunnar and Westburg so the contract matches up with the Orioles timeline very well.
If the Orioles were supposedly willing to give Burns 4 years 180 million they should be ecstatic to trade for what’s left of Pablo Lopez’s contract.
I don’t see why the Twins would want to trade Ober or Ryan but those guys would be incredible additions to this Orioles rotation if the they were even willing to discuss moving them.
The Rockies
Who knows what the Rockies are ever thinking, they may be considering buying at this deadline, but assuming they’d think about trading away some players, Kyle Freeland and German Marquez are interesting arms that would be better than what the Orioles currently have and the Orioles would be buying very very low and with how the Rockies operate they might even pay what’s left on those contracts for the Orioles.
The Cardinals
The Cardinals have been better than I thought they’d be but they still know what direction this season is going and should be open to listening on trades for Sonny Gray or Erick Fedde. Gray would instantly be the Orioles new number 1 and Fedde would be the Orioles second best starter. Fedde is in the last year of his deal and Gray is expensive so both of those factors should mitigate the price that the Orioles would have to pay to get them.
I do realize that it would be very un-Cardinals like to sell out the season so early so I don’t think this is very likely compared to the other teams here but either of these 2 pitchers would drastically shift how the Orioles rotation is viewed and the Cardinals new leadership might be pragmatic enough to ignore the Cardinal way.
Looking at the standings these are the only teams that I think would realistically entertain waving the white flag in the first month of the season. The White Sox are obviously also on the list but they don’t have anyone that would improve the Orioles fortunes.
So in short here is the Orioles path to being back:
- Gibson up
- Eflin back
- Trade for a starter early
- Stack wins against a soft schedule in May
- Get Bradish back late in the year
- Try to win 1 playoff game
Going back to our machete analogy from earlier, let’s say that once the doctor gets to looking at our bloody friend he might find some health issues besides the machete injury.
The Orioles offense also needs to be better. Coming into the year the vision I had for Orioles success was that their 2 best pitchers (Grayson and Eflin) would each pitch to a high 3s ERA and then the other 3 guys in the rotation (Morton, Sugano, Kremer or whoever) would pitch to a mid 4s ERA and that sort of uninspiring but sturdy kind of rotation combined with one of the top offenses in baseball would be enough to get through the regular season.
The rotation is most noticeably failing to live up to their end of that bargain but the Orioles offense, which many people expected to be elite, has not quite held up their end of the bargain either.
Teamwise they are around the 10th best offense which isn’t bad but even if their rotation was what I expected it to be they would have had a hard time stringing together wins with just the 10th best offense.
Individually most of the Orioles young stars are off to a disappointing start to the season. I know batting average is for cavemen but Adley is hitting .208, Gunnar is hitting .228, Jackson Holliday is hitting .220 and Jordan Westburg is hitting .194 and that’s just not going to get the job done.
Cedric Mullins and Ryan O’Hearn are off to good starts which is great but the Orioles really need the guys who are supposed to be their best players to be their best players and until that happens it really doesn’t matter who is starting the games.
Besides the Orioles stars slumping it also doesn’t help that their bench guys are negative WAR players. Jorge Mateo is 1-17 with 6 strikeouts, a GIDP and 4 errors, according to fangraphs he’s been the third least valuable player in all of baseball and Brandon Hyde plays him like he’s a viable platoon bat. Gary Sanchez is 3-22 with 9 Ks and no extra base hits. I understand why a backup catcher playing once or twice a week is necessary but if we’re gonna roll with the bad at defense style of backup catcher I’d like to get a little offense out of it.
The fact that these 2 terrible hitters are both right handed is especially rough because it means that if the opposing starter is left handed they will both be in the lineup and so far that’s been a recipe for a guaranteed loss.
I have to believe that the Orioles best players will get their numbers back to what they should be and if that happens as the Orioles get some better starting pitching then they will soar up the standings. Right now with the bitter taste of a 24-2 loss in everyone’s mouth it feels impossible to think that things could get better but when you look at the numbers they almost have to.
Now that we’ve diagnosed the problem and set up a recovery program the real issue is that when our machete victim goes home they’re going to keep working with the guy that chopped off their hand with a machete and machete man is not going to want to follow those recovery steps and we might find our patient back with another bloody hand again this time next year.
Was that too vague? Do I need to say that Mike Elias is the problem and that he’s not going to do what is necessary to save this season and that the Orioles are going to continue to not have the pitching to keep up with the teams in their division that are willing to pay for good players to be on their team?
The Dishwasher 
Leave a comment