Ahead of Tuesday’s game against the Mariners, the Orioles made it official: Félix Bautista will not be pitching again for the team this season. Interim manager Tony Mansolino told reporters that Bautista has a “significant” shoulder injury and will be out for the rest of the season. The exact diagnosis, according to Mansolino, awaits another follow-up and more tests.
You could kind of feel this coming. The Orioles have a tendency to pretend that a player will be back any day now for about as long as they can possibly get away with that. When they don’t even go through the motions in pretending about this, you know it’s going to be something serious. Bautista landed on the injured list and everything was vague, distant, ominous.
The answer at the end of that would not be good, and sure enough, it isn’t. We still don’t know what the answer is for a diagnosis, how to treat that, or the recovery period. What we know is it’s bad enough that Bautista won’t be back in six weeks. No rush in getting him back in the midst of this lost season for the Orioles. The team can only hope that whatever it is can be resolved in time for Bautista to build himself back up for next season.
Bautista isn’t even the only Orioles pitcher ruled out for the rest of the year on Tuesday. Mansolino also said that Zach Eflin will be having a back procedure, lumbar microdiscectomy, which will shut him down for the remainder of the season as well. It’s a double disappointment for two pitchers who were expected to be key parts of a successful Orioles team this year.
Eflin has ended up with 14 starts, in which he posted a 5.93 ERA and 5.62 FIP. His results reflect the fact that he did not pitch very well. Fewer than half of his starts were good and the bad ones were very bad. A season that began with fans (and who knows, maybe even the front office) counting the chickens of qualifying offer-caliber players will, with this Eflin news, pretty much officially end up with zero such players. It’s surely not the platform back into free agency that Eflin would have liked.
At least Bautista mostly got good results when he pitched. Over 35 games, the man dubbed the Mountain dropped a 2.60 ERA on the league, with a 1.125 WHIP. The thing that hurt him was a walk rate that was increased by about half over where he was last season. Not much to be done about that except hope whatever was causing it can be resolved by the time next season starts. In the meantime, it’s another double bummer for Orioles fans in the final third of what has been a demoralizing season from our favorite baseball team.