If things go well for Kimbrel, he’ll be in the top 5 of the career saves list by season’s end
How he got here: Signed as free agent, 12/6/23
Two and a half months later, it’s still weird to me that Craig Kimbrel is on the Orioles. Players with Kimbrel’s career track record don’t just get signed by the Orioles as free agents every year, or even every era of the O’s. Before this, you have to go back to, what? Vladimir Guerrero’s signing before the 2011 season? The situation the O’s were in at that time was very different.
In Hall of Fame voting this year, longtime closer Billy Wagner came a handful of votes away from being elected. Kimbrel, who turns 36 in May, is not that far off of having a comparable career to Wagner. With a strong 2024, and with the Orioles holding a team option for 2025, we could, if things go right for Kimbrel, be witnessing the last burst to get a borderline guy across the finish line.
If they don’t go right, we’ll be wondering if Mike Elias could have picked someone better. The risk to the Orioles is not so much the possibility of wasting the $13 million Kimbrel is getting paid this year. The downside is if he comes here and sucks and costs the team games when they’re in a position that every game counts.
Rooting for former Red Sox does not come easily around here. That’s the other weird thing. We saw a good bit of Kimbrel when he was with Boston for three years, so to me he’s strongly associated with having been on that team, even though it was actually only about a quarter of his career innings. I don’t think it will end up being too hard to cheer for him when he’s pitching the ninth inning for this year’s O’s. We’ll just have to get used to that distinctive pre-pitching posture being a good thing for us, rather than a bad one.
Or at least, hopefully it will be a good thing. One of the key questions for the Orioles this year is going to be what Kimbrel has left in the tank. We’re now about six years removed from when Kimbrel was indisputably in the upper echelon of relievers, year in and year out. He has, at least, bounced back in results from a rough stretch in Chicago and joins the O’s off of a mostly-successful 2023 campaign in Philadelphia. The year before that he had a not-failure 2022 season for the Dodgers.
Kimbrel’s big problem last year was allowing home runs. He gave up a double digit number of dingers for the first time in his career. The majority of these were hit by righties, so the Walltimore difference for home games can certainly be hoped as a factor to spur some improvement. Even with this problem, he had a 3.26 ERA and 1.043 WHIP for the season, allowing a .611 OPS to batters overall. This came with almost no platoon split.
Those are not terrible numbers. The lack of a platoon problem doesn’t mean you have to hold your breath every time the other team pinch hits. The thing that the Orioles may have to contend with is that they aren’t Bautista-like numbers. There’s a gap. The 2023 O’s would have won fewer than 101 games if their closer had a Bryan Baker ERA (3.60) instead of Bautista’s. Mitigating the gap may require other players to step up.
Bautista laid waste to most batters, such that by the time he was injured he had a 1.48 ERA, 0.918 WHIP, and .460 OPS allowed. Kimbrel was doing numbers like that a decade ago, but it’s not 2014 any more. Those 2023 Kimbrel numbers were more similar to where Yennier Cano ended up last season. Cano had a much lower ERA at 2.11. A 1.005 WHIP and .600 OPS allowed are pretty darn close, though. Kimbrel had the advantage of striking out batters nearly 50% more often than Cano did.
That has the potential to be a decent last two innings. Again, these aren’t bad results at all! They’re just not “Your closer is in the Cy Young conversation” numbers, like Bautista was before he got hurt. Especially when, whether by bad luck or bad pitching, Kimbrel finished 2023 with six losses, compared to Bautista’s two. He blew four other save situations that did not go into the loss column for him.
Focusing solely on games in which Kimbrel was the losing pitcher gives us one more area to think about. During Philly’s NLCS matchup against the Diamondbacks, Kimbrel took the loss in two of the four defeats that sent Arizona into the World Series. This was after Kimbrel pitched three scoreless outings across the Wild Card and Division Series rounds.
By their nature, closers have to pitch in the biggest spots and you don’t want to think about your favorite team’s closer blowing it in a big spot. If the Orioles get to the point where they’re protecting leads in the LCS round and we have to worry about Kimbrel being up to that task, then that means things have gone better in the postseason than they did last year.
Kimbrel enters the 2024 season with 417 career saves. That’s already eighth place on the all-time list and he only needs 20 more to get into the top five. He’ll be dueling with current Red Sox closer Kenley Jansen this year, as Jansen stands at 420 saves. After these guys retire, they’ll be at the center of the debate of what it should take for closers of the 2010s and 2020s to be Hall of Fame-worthy. Let’s hope Kimbrel’s Orioles chapter doesn’t drop him right out of that conversation.
Monday: Corbin Burnes