With 13 days to go before Opening Day, the Orioles have their starting pitcher. The team announced before Friday\u2019s spring training game against the Phillies that the dominant star from last year, Trevor Rogers, is getting the nod for the first start of the season.<\/p>\n
On one hand, it\u2019s no surprise that the guy who had a 1.81 ERA across 18 starts last season, who accumulated 5.5 bWAR in only 109.2 innings, is getting lined up as the #1 starter for the season. If he had performed like that over a full season, he would have been an easy winner for the AL Cy Young award.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it\u2019s at least a tiny surprise, if only because there\u2019s also Kyle Bradish, who is longer-tenured with the team and still looked pretty ace-like in his return last year from Tommy John surgery. By starting Wednesday\u2019s spring training game, Bradish appeared to be lined up for Opening Day on regular rest. The team has gone in another direction.<\/p>\n
As of this writing, there has not been any official indication from manager Craig Albernaz about how he might line up his other starting pitchers. Given that there are six starting pitching candidates, he hasn\u2019t even announced whether he will do a six-man rotation. For now, my best guess is that things will line up with Rogers followed by Bradish, Shane Baz, Chris Bassitt, and Dean Kremer, with Zach Eflin getting something like a two-week rehab stint at the start of the season to fully build up from last year\u2019s back surgery.<\/p>\n
The team has continually not indicated Eflin is behind schedule, though, so I\u2019m starting to doubt that as the resolution. If nobody gets hurt between now and Opening Day, are they going to put Kremer in the bullpen? Send him to the minors? Though the #1 spot is resolved, many questions remain here. The Orioles probably have an idea internally what they\u2019re going to do about these things, but they haven\u2019t showed their cards yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With 13 days to go before Opening Day, the Orioles have their starting pitcher. The team announced before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2374],"tags":[143,47,7936,2538,5,4,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-624710","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-baltimore-orioles","8":"tag-baltimore","9":"tag-baltimore-orioles","10":"tag-baltimore-orioles-news","11":"tag-baltimoreorioles","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-orioles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116232019233928230","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624710","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=624710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}