If not for Suárez’s unexpected emergence, the Orioles rotation picture could have been a grim one.
One of the common trends of spring training from year to year is the list of non-roster invites who are players probably no Orioles fan has ever thought of before and most likely will never think of again once the season begins. The 2024 spring training roster had fewer invited players than usual but still slipped in a fair number of the anonymous: Daniel Bañuelos, Daniel Johnson, Ronald Guzmán, Albert Suárez, Andrew Suárez, Nathan Webb.
As is typical, I had no expectation that any of these players would matter to the 2024 team. Albert Suárez, a 34-year-old with previous major league experience who had just spent the last several years pitching in Japan and South Korea, became the latest non-roster invite to prove me wrong by going on to be a significant contributor to the team.
The door was cracked open for someone unexpected to emerge from the very first day of spring training, when Mike Elias revealed the previously-unannounced roll of injuries. That blew everyone’s dreams of an Opening Day rotation including either Kyle Bradish or John Means right out of the sky. Yet even this didn’t get Suárez onto the roster on March 28. It was only when Tyler Wells went down for the season after making just three starts that Suárez entered the picture.
With all of Bradish, Means, and Wells on the shelf, it was really only out of desperation that the Orioles turned to Suárez. April was far too early to consider a prospect like Cade Povich or Chayce McDermott, or to make the kind of trades that the team ultimately made in July.
Having Suárez in the rotation could have easily looked a lot like the ghosts of bad Orioles rotations past, like Matt Harvey, Spenser Watkins, or Asher Wojciechowski. He came along with a ready-made feel-good story: Out of the league since 2017, his brother Robert having recently made the jump from Japanese baseball to an MLB role with the Padres. In Birdland, we are well-aware that feel-good stories offer no guarantee of feel-good performance.
Suárez was summoned to the Orioles rotation for the first time on April 17. After 5.2 scoreless innings against the Twins, he made another start that also ended with 5.2 scoreless against the Angels. A third start where he gave up four runs in four innings against Oakland, combined with the short-lived returns of Bradish and Means, kicked Suárez into the bullpen.
The exile was only temporary. Suárez kept himself on the radar by rattling off ten innings across seven outings where he gave up just one earned run. This stretch of games saw him limit opposing batters to a .401 OPS, with only four hits allowed overall. This went well enough to where you could start to wonder if the Orioles had actually found a useful reliever to throw into the mix.
We never got to find out because Means was quickly back on the shelf and Suárez was right back into the rotation. Even in July, when the Orioles acquired two starting pitchers, Suárez only ended up back in the bullpen for exactly one game, with Grayson Rodriguez getting hurt to open up a rotation spot for him yet again. In addition to the injuries knocking out players, Suárez outlasted Cole Irvin, Cade Povich, and Trevor Rogers for performance reasons.
Through all of this back and forth, Suárez kept on rolling along at the level of a perfectly cromulent back-of-the-rotation starting pitcher. He was never quite good enough for long to make you (or at least me) think that he had completely escaped the possibility of a sudden collapse, with clunkers against poor-hitting teams like the Marlins and White Sox.
Still, most of the time Suárez was good enough, and that shows in the team’s record in his starts: 13-11. This is dependent on run support and the bullpen not blowing it, so there’s some luck involved. There was also a lot of Suárez pitching decently – perfectly acceptably for the #4 or #5 guy in the rotation.
All in all, Suárez finished with a 3.70 ERA for the season. That’s almost exactly a league-average pitcher; in the park/league-adjusted ERA+ stat, where 100 is average, Suárez finished with a 101. Take out his relief outings and he had a 3.76 ERA in his 24 starts.
In terms of WAR value, Suárez clocked in at 2.1 in bWAR and 1.4 in fWAR. The only Orioles pitcher with a higher bWAR as an Oriole was Corbin Burnes at 3.2. (Zach Eflin had 2.6 bWAR, but only 1.6 of that was with the O’s.) The FIP-based fWAR docked Suárez some value because Suárez had one of the weaker strikeout rates for a starting pitcher, so his FIP was about a half of a run above his ERA.
The Orioles needed Suárez more than any of us could have imagined in February and he answered the call all year. The team had a tough enough time getting through the second half of the season as it was. Take out Suárez and put in some 6+ ERA jabroni and the 2024 Orioles would have ended up a lot closer to the disaster that at times it seemed like they were going to reach.
Suárez is going to be an important piece to start the 2025 season too. Though he’s now 35, the long hiatus for his MLB career while he pitched in Asia means he’s still going to be a pre-arbitration player next season, so the cost to retain him is almost non-existent.
Can Suárez do something like this again? We’re probably going to find out. Maybe he can be what Miguel González was to the 2012-14 Orioles. As things stand right now, Suárez is probably the #3 starter on paper, behind Eflin and Rodriguez and ahead of Kremer and Povich. You can swap Kremer and Suárez if you want. Either way, it doesn’t seem like Suárez would be the first guy bumped out by an impact signing or trade.
Monday: Ryan Mountcastle