Image credit: Syndication: Arizona Republic
This article originally ran on April 16, 2025.
The Orioles are 6-10 and sit in the cellar of a less-than-impressive AL East entering play on Wednesday. It’s not the start that anyone in Baltimore wants, or envisioned. But it’s also not exactly a surprise, considering the manner in which it’s come about.
The culprit isn’t a mystery: Baltimore sports a league-worst ERA for starting pitchers. If you read our season preview and then checked out completely until this very moment, this would be a bit of a surprise, although not out of the question:
Of course that preview ran March 3, and in the intervening time, Baltimore’s best-projected hurler, Grayson Rodriguez, went down with elbow inflammation and has yet to make an appearance this season. That’s resulted in the elevation of Cade Povich to the rotation, and while he’s spun a solid 3.60 ERA and 14:3 K:BB rate in 15 innings, that’s also come with 24 hits allowed—I believe the technical term is “scattered” when it comes to that many hits in that few innings. Likewise, Tomoyuki Sugano has managed a 3.86 ERA despite five punchouts and five walks, against 17 hits in 14 frames. Instead the hole has largely been dug by Charlie Morton, whose five earned runs in five innings last night only raised his seasonal ERA by 0.03 (from 8.81 to 8.84), and Dean Kremer. But they’re handing out more shovels, because Opening Day starter Zach Eflin has also hit the injured list.
Despite relatively modest ERAs for 60% of the rotation, only one of the five pitchers to start a game holds a DRA- above league-average (Povich, 95), and none of them have a projected DRA- below 101 the rest of the way.
This isn’t entirely fair, of course. Missing a Grayson Rodriguez-type pitcher would be a problem for just about any rotation, and the Orioles did ink Kyle Gibson to a deal towards the middle of March—he just hasn’t finished completing his modified spring training. But that’s also not much of a salve, given his projected 114 DRA- is worse than any of the aforementioned hurlers. And the damage isn’t just at the surface: The pitchers the Orioles would prefer to call upon in the event of an injury (or several) are also quite banged up: Albert Suárez, Trevor Rogers, and Chayce McDermott are all in varying stages of disrepair, while Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells entered the season recovering from elbow surgeries.
Given all that, Orioles general manager Mike Elias addressed the media on Tuesday, providing a swath of injury updates, and some commentary on the start to the season. Per The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka:
Mike Elias: “On the pitching side, I feel we have already tapped into, basically, the depth. To say that on April 15 is not the plan. … Having Grayson and Eflin on the shelf simultaneously at this point in the season, at no point were we forecasting that.”
— Andy Kostka (@afkostka.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 4:24 PM
No one would fault Elias or the Orioles for struggling through the loss of Rodriguez and Eflin, among others. But to say that “at no point were we forecasting that” betrays a staggering amount of either naivete or hubris. They are pitchers, and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’d know that pitchers of essentially any persuasion get hurt. But Eflin and Rodriguez are also two specific pitchers who haven’t earned the assumption of sturdiness that Elias’ quote implies: Eflin has landed on the IL every single season of his major league career (excepting 2020), which goes back to 2016, and Rodriguez was on the IL twice last season, including a lengthy stay at the end of the year that caused him to miss the playoffs.
To say it after spending the entire offseason nearly ignoring the loss of Corbin Burnes…that borders on malpractice. Entering the winter, the Orioles were a frequent topic on Five & Dive, and I was fond of saying that the club appeared to be at a launching point, with a new ownership in place that was saying the right thing about expanding budget to accommodate free agents and extensions, but that it wasn’t clear to me whether Elias could switch gears out of perpetual rebuild mode to take advantage of that opportunity. Some five months later, any clarity we’ve gained to that effect has been in the wrong direction.
The Orioles continue to stockpile prospect bats, to the point that some of them have voiced displeasure over the situation (though also walked them back). The obvious solution would be to follow up on the Joey Ortiz/DL Hall-for-Corbin Burnes swap with a similar style acquisition. It’s possible something like that wasn’t on offer over the winter, though the club was well-positioned to compete with Boston on Garret Crochet if they so chose. It’s also possible they’re waiting to make an in-season move for the likes of Sandy Alcantara or someone in that vein. But the Burnes deal also felt like it was made at gunpoint in terms of motivation, and the lack of any follow up despite a clear need for both quality and depth in the rotation speaks volumes.
Elias also noted that he still believes the Orioles are a playoff team. Even considering all of the above, I can’t fault him there: The O’s still have a 20% chance to win the division per PECOTA, and are projected for 85 wins; tied with the Yankees and Rays, and one game back of Toronto. But that’s also faint praise given how suddenly mediocre so much of the American League seems at the moment—not a single team projects over 88 wins.
All of this remains fixable. Pick up Alcantara (or a comparable front-liner), and basically all this criticism melts away. But the seeming lack of interest in switching gears from org builder to aggressor could leave the franchise looking more like the Jerry Dipoto Mariners than the Dave Dombrowski Phillies or the Andrew Friedman Dodgers. The Orioles are necessarily in a different situation than all of those clubs, but not so different that they couldn’t have addressed their blatant deficits ahead of the season. Even the most charitable interpretation of that quote—that they didn’t think both would be on the shelf at the same time so early in the year—isn’t exculpatory. I take Elias at his word that they didn’t anticipate the current situation, but I also know whose job it is to do just that.
Thanks to Andy Kostka and the Baltimore Banner for their excellent coverage.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.