mixed reviews<\/a> here in Birdland, but nobody\u2019s furious about it. Bassitt is a solid major league pitcher who posted respectable numbers in 2025, including a strong strikeout-to-innings ratio in the postseason. He\u2019s durable, he\u2019s experienced, and he knows how to navigate a lineup the third time through the order. He\u2019s not chopped liver.<\/p>\nBut he\u2019s also not what we were promised. And that gap between expectation and reality has become uncomfortably familiar.<\/p>\n
Cast your mind back a few offseasons. The names then were Dylan Cease and Max Fried\u2014legitimate top-of-the-rotation arms who would have transformed the Orioles\u2019 pitching staff. Instead, the team zigged when fans expected them to zag, opting for the safer, cheaper, shorter-term solution. Jordan Lyles. Kyle Gibson. Charlie Morton. Tomoyuki Sugano. Bassitt.<\/p>\n
The pattern has become so predictable that it\u2019s practically a signature of the Elias era: dream big in December, settle in January.<\/p>\n
The question that nags at me isn\u2019t whether Bassitt can help. He can. It\u2019s whether this approach\u2014the perpetual one-year deal, the endless bridge contracts, the faith that everything will break right\u2014is actually a viable path to a championship. Because when you look around the American League East, the Orioles\u2019 division rivals aren\u2019t playing it safe. The Yankees have made moves. The Blue Jays have been aggressive. Even the Red Sox, who\u2019ve had their own organizational soul-searching to do, have shown more willingness to commit.<\/p>\n
The Orioles, meanwhile, are still asking us to trust the process.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s true, the process could work. The best-case scenario for Baltimore\u2019s 2025 rotation is genuinely exciting: Kyle Bradish returns to Cy Young form after his injury, Trevor Rogers replicates his magical comeback season, Shane Baz rediscovers his pre-injury stuff, and Zach Eflin\u2019s back holds up. Add a steady Bassitt to that mix, and you\u2019ve got something.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s an awful lot of ifs. It\u2019s a rotation built on the assumption that everyone hits a ceiling they\u2019ve reached, in most cases, exactly once. It\u2019s a plan that requires the baseball gods to smile on Baltimore while frowning on everyone else. It\u2019s hope dressed up as strategy.<\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019m being too harsh. Results have a way of silencing concerns about process, and if the Orioles surprise everyone and make a deep October run, I\u2019ll happily eat these words. Good outcomes quiet the haters, myself potentially included.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s what bothers me: this has become a philosophy, not just a tactic. Don\u2019t draft pitchers high. Avoid the raw high school talent. Squeeze value out of waiver wire pickups and veterans willing to bet on themselves with short-term deals. It\u2019s smart, in its way\u2014analytically defensible, fiscally responsible, low-risk in any individual transaction.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also not inspiring. And it\u2019s not how you build a champion.<\/p>\n
The Tampa Bay Rays have been doing this dance for years, finding value in the margins, developing what they have, never quite spending like the big boys. They\u2019ve been to one World Series this century. They lost. At some point, you have to wonder whether the ceiling on this approach is \u201cperpetually competitive\u201d rather than \u201cchampion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Orioles have a young core that\u2019s ready to win now. Gunnar Henderson isn\u2019t getting any cheaper. Adley Rutschman\u2019s window is open. The time to push the chips to the center of the table is now, not in some hypothetical future when all the one-year deals finally add up to something.<\/p>\n
Chris Bassitt will take the ball every fifth day and give the Orioles a chance to win. That\u2019s valuable. But when you\u2019re chasing a championship, \u201cgiving yourself a chance\u201d isn\u2019t the same as \u201cgoing for it.\u201d And after another offseason of watching the Orioles linked to aces only to settle for something less, it\u2019s hard not to feel like we\u2019re watching the same movie for the third or fourth time.<\/p>\n
Plan B can work. Sometimes the backup option turns out to be the right call all along.<\/p>\n
But it sure would be nice, just once, to see what Plan A looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s become something of an annual tradition in Birdland: the hot stove season heats up, the rumor mill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2374],"tags":[143,47,3357,2538,5,4,125],"class_list":["post-570371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-baltimore-orioles","tag-baltimore","tag-baltimore-orioles","tag-baltimore-orioles-analysis","tag-baltimoreorioles","tag-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-orioles"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116063935094075885","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}