The front office’s unwillingness to draft top pitching prospects has left the minors with few reinforcements for the Orioles’ current pitching probelm
We all know that this Orioles rotation is a mess. Already this week, we’ve outlined how this rotation is so bereft of talent right now that simply removing the disastrous Charlie Morton for a replacement-level player isn’t enough to fix it.
Some have honed in on general manager Mike Elias’ decisions to “replace” Corbin Burnes with the likes of Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano and Kyle Gibson as the biggest determining factor for this staff’s downfall. Others have opined that the injury situation is so dire, with top starters Zach Eflin, Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish all on the IL, that it would have been impossible for Elias to put enough contingencies in place to keep this rotation afloat. The O’s came into the season looking to improve upon their back-to-back playoff and instead are trending toward a potential last-place finish, mostly due to the rotation’s struggles.
A seldom-mentioned aspect of this precipitous decline is Elias’ approach to building pitching depth in the minor leagues. The Elias-led front office has become notorious for refusing to spend high draft picks on pitchers. Since his appointment in the winter of 2019, Elias has overseen six drafts with the Orioles. Over those six drafts, Elias has made 133 selections, with 63 (47.4%) being pitchers that he drafted and signed.
However, of the Orioles’ 26 picks inside the top 100 selections of the draft, Elias has used exactly three of them on pitchers. Elias drafted Nolan McLean out of Oklahoma State with the 81st pick (third round) of the 2022 draft—only for McLean to go unsigned and land with the Mets in the third round in 2023. In that 2023 draft, Elias & Co. really splurged on pitching, using the 63rd pick on Jackson Baumeister out of Florida State and the 86th pick on Kiefer Lord from Washington.
Currently, Baumeister is in the Rays system after being shipped out last year as part of the Zach Eflin trade. Lord, on the other hand, is still with the Orioles organization, but last pitched in 2023 and is currently recovering from Tommy John surgery. So currently, no pitcher Mike Elias drafted in the top 100 picks of a draft is pitching for an Orioles’ affiliate.
That’s not to say the current front office has completely whiffed on their attempts at drafting and developing pitchers. There are eight pitchers in the Orioles’ Top 30 Prospects that Elias & Co. drafted or acquired. They are led by a quartet of pitchers from the 2023 draft; 14th-round pick Michel Forret, fifth-rounder Patrick Reilly (acquired from the Pirates for Billy Cook), 11th-rounder Nestor German and undrafted free agent Trey Gibson. Those four RHPs, as well as 18-year-old international signing Keeler Morfe, are all among the O’s top 15 prospects and represent a potential wealth of pitching depth in the future.
That’s the problem that Elias has created for himself, though; he’s laid the foundation for a future pitching supply line while helping create a giant need for big league pitching right now. Of those pitchers in the top 15, only Reilly has reached Double-A Chesapeake, where he has a 1.86 ERA but left his last start with elbow soreness. The other three players from the 2023 draft are all in their second year at Aberdeen and still a ways off from sniffing the big leagues.
The fact that most of the Orioles’ upper-tier, minor league pitching talent is still in the lower levels means there’s currently a talent gap at Norfolk. The Tides’ current rotation consists of career minor leaguer Thaddeus Ward, former Mariners international signing Raúl Alcantara, 2022 eighth-round pick Cameron Weston and recent MLB debutant Brandon Young.
The current options at Triple-A are even a far cry from the depth the O’s had at Norfolk last year. In 2024, the Tides featured MLB vet Bruce Zimmermann and top prospects Cade Povich and Chayce McDermott. While none of those guys would save the current Orioles rotation, they were certainly more MLB-ready than any alternatives Baltimore could currently turn to.
The fact that Povich, McDermott and Young are the best starters that Elias has acquired, developed and brought to Baltimore is perhaps further indictment of the GM’s approach to building rotational depth. In 20 big league starts, Povich has a 5.42 ERA with a 4.81 FIP while giving up a .837 opponent OPS. The expectation was that the 25-year-old lefty would make a leap in his first full big league season, but the opposite has been true through four starts. McDermott and Young each only have one major league start to their names, but neither seemed wholly ready to take on a bigger role in the majors.
Part of this lack of dependable minor league depth is by design. Elias & Co. have lived by the mantra of “draft the bats, buy the pitching” through their 6+ year tenure. It’s the team-building strategy that their previous employers in Houston used to construct a team that’s won the World Series twice in the last eight seasons while making eight-straight postseason appearances.
The problem comes in that Elias and the Orioles have so far been unwilling to buy pitching at a sustainable rate. Part of this problem seemingly comes down to a lack of aggression from Elias. The Orioles’ GM is often publicly accused of holding on too tightly to his prospects in trade negotiations. This unwillingness to part with Elias’ draft picks often leaves the O’s settling for short-term rentals like Burnes and Jack Flaherty or value-oriented moves like last year’s acquisitions of Eflin and Trevor Rogers. Elias is similarly risk-averse in the free agent market, preferring to sign one-year deals with vets like Jordan Lyles, Gibson, Morton and Sugano.
The past offseason’s lackluster attempt at addressing the starting rotation is not something Elias can redo. The range of outcomes for this group of starters was always going to be wide; the mounting injuries and on-field struggles mean we’ve already started to see the worst-case scenario three weeks into the season. While the damage may be too great to fix this season, hopefully the carnage serves to alter this front office’s team-building approach, starting with the draft in July.