Sometimes it seems as if every pitching staff in baseball is loaded with an endless supply of flamethrowers who can hit 100 miles per hour on the radar gun. Or at least, every pitching staff except for the Orioles. The team finished the 2025 season with the second-slowest average fastball velocity across its entire pitching staff, just 93.1mph. They are going to have to find a stream of hard-throwing prospects to catch up.

Before the 2025 season began, several prospect lists took note of an 18-year-old right-handed pitching prospect, Keeler Morfe, for being just such a player. Morfe was 15th in the Camden Chat composite top Orioles prospects list heading into the season, ranking as high as 9th on MLB Pipeline’s list. On that Pipeline list, the Venezuelan righty ranked higher than every other Orioles pitching prospect except for Chayce McDermott and Michael Forret. (CC’s Andrea covered McDermott’s disappointing 2025 campaign last week.)

What made Morfe stand out as a prospect wasn’t just the velocity but what he was able to do with it in his early pro action in the Dominican Summer League in 2024. He struck out 38 batters in 22 innings in the DSL before getting advanced to the lowest full-season Orioles affiliate in Delmarva. Doing that while hitting 100 on the gun gets some attention.

Keeping the attention is a different story. Unfortunately for Morfe, that’s where things stalled out over the course of this season. He got his first chance to make a mark in the March spotlight of the Spring Breakout game where Orioles prospects played minor leaguers from the Pirates. Morfe made the start in the game and he was battling command problems from the get-go. He walked two batters and gave up two hits while failing to even complete the first inning.

Assigned to Low-A Delmarva beginning this season, Morfe picked up where he left off from that Spring Breakout game. In fact, he was even worse. His first start of the year also saw him fail to get out of the first inning, in large part because he walked five guys. No, really. And in his second start of the season, he again walked five guys while not getting through one inning. It doesn’t matter how hard a guy is throwing with that kind of command.

The possibility of any development happening this season ground to a halt shortly afterwards. Morfe was placed on the injured list in the middle of April due to a sprain in his right ring finger. He did not make it back to Delmarva until the end of July. Can you guess how many guys he walked in his first start off the IL? Five! This is only an appropriate number of guys if you’re in the market for a particular style of burgers and fries.

By the time the 2025 season wrapped up, Morfe pitched a total of nine games for the Shorebirds. In these outings, he walked a total of 24 batters in 15.1 innings. When he wasn’t walking guys, batters had a heck of a time trying to hit him, with just a .185 average allowed over the course of the season. That’s good! It’s just… you know, the walks. There were so many of them. So many walks.

There’s not much positive to take out of it. No pitcher can succeed with that kind of walk rate. Command can arrive late for hard-throwers in particular. Among recent Orioles in particular, Félix Bautista didn’t find any kind of command until his age 22 season and he didn’t achieve consistency with it until age 27.

For the Orioles organization as a whole, the good news is that all of the eggs for developing international-signing pitching prospects were not in the Morfe basket. Esteban Mejia is the young, hard-throwing pitcher who really burst onto the scene in this year’s game action, and one level higher, lefty prospect Luis De León (article coming next week) wasn’t quite hitting triple digits but still made some noise with the upper-90s velocity that the organization lacks.

As for Morfe, he probably won’t be ranked nearly so highly on next year’s prospect lists, if he is ranked at all. There is nothing for the Orioles to really do but try to harness his command with development work that will continue at the Low-A level until he figures out how to throw strikes. There’s not much cost to giving him more chances to figure it out. He is young and there is plenty of time left to be patient.