After tossing seven no-hit innings in his latest start vs. Chicago, the Orioles ace is at full strength and ready to help this rotation unleash its full potential.
Kyle Bradish’s 2024 season almost ended before it started. Or at least that’s what it felt like when the club announced that he was being shut down in spring training due to a sprain of his UCL. Any time the words “UCL injury” are mentioned in the same sentence as your favorite pitcher, it feels like a death sentence for that pitcher’s season. If Bradish’s seven shutout innings against the White Sox this past Sunday proved anything, it’s that he’s healthy and starting to fire on all cylinders. Which should be a scary sight for American League fans outside of Birdland.
Bradish’s importance for the overall strength and depth of this rotation cannot be overstated. Yes, Corbin Burnes will likely still be the Game 1 starter whenever the Orioles’ first playoff series rolls around. Yes, Grayson Rodriguez looks like he’s on his way to fulfilling the potential he showed when he was named the No. 1 pitching prospect in all of baseball. And yet, it still feels like a fully firing Bradish is the pitcher that takes this O’s rotation from good to top of the AL.
In 48 starts since the 2022 All-Star Break, Bradish has a 2.84 ERA and has 267 strikeouts in 265.2 innings. His fourth place finish in 2023 AL Cy Young voting was the highest an Orioles pitcher has finished since Mike Mussina finished second to Pedro Martinez in 1999.
On multiple MASN broadcasts last season, the broadcast crew reflected on Mike Elias’ initial evaluations of the organization’s pitching depth at the beginning of the rebuild. While G-Rod was nationally considered the only Orioles pitching prospect with upper echelon potential, Elias and his staff looked at Bradish as having the same ceiling as Grayson. With every start, Bradish proves the front office more and more correct.
This latest start also shows that Kyle Bradish is still evolving as a pitcher in his third MLB season. When Bradish first came up, he was a four-seam first pitcher. The only problem was his four-seamer just wasn’t very good. By Run Value, Bradish’s four-seam fastball was the fifth-worst fastball in 2022 and the seventh-worst pitch of any type. On the year, opponents hit .321 off Bradish’s fastball and slugged a worrying .539.
When a rookie Bradish came back from a month-long stint on the IL, he started to develop a different approach. Slowly but surely, his fastball usage went down and his slider usage went up. In four of his last seven starts as a rookie, he threw more sliders than any other pitch. In September that year, he also began to incorporate a sinker/two-seamer into his arsenal. Those two adjustments set him down the path to where he is today as one of the AL’s most feared pitchers.
Throughout 2023, Bradish continued his trend of “pitching backwards” to hitters. His slider became his go-to offering early in counts as he consistently nailed the low and outside corner against right handers while moving it all over against lefties. Of pitchers who threw at least 800 sliders in 2023, only Clayton Kershaw, Logan Gilbert and Jon Gray got more value out of their slider than Bradish.
What made this approach so effective is that it opened up Bradish’s full arsenal once he got ahead in the count. If you were sitting on a breaking ball, he could dot a corner with his four-seamer or run the sinker back over the plate to punch you out looking. Even if he did throw you a breaking ball, he might continue to work the slider away or drop his devastating curveball at the bottom of the zone. Whereas the traditional approach to pitching is to use the fastball to set up all your other pitches, Bradish frequently set up his putaway pitches with his slider (and sometimes the putaway pitch was also a slider).
So far in 2024, we’ve seen the 27-year-old righty retool how he deploys his arsenal once again. In the culmination of a journey spanning three seasons, Bradish’s sinker has gone from a pitch not even in his repertoire to his go-to pitch this season. After throwing his four-seam fastball and sinker both a little over 20% last season, Bradish is throwing almost 40% sinkers this year and only 13% four-seamers. Not only has the Orioles’ second ace started throwing his sinker early in counts, but it’s also become his best out pitch. Of his 34 Ks this season, 23 have come on sinkers. Against the White Sox on Sunday, Bradish recorded seven Ks via sinker—tied for the most Ks on a single pitch in any start of his career.
Bradish’s best. pic.twitter.com/NhpkTBTdi1
— MLB (@MLB) May 26, 2024
Those seven no-hit innings on the Southside also speak as much to his health as they do to his dominance. More important than the number in the hit column (0) was the number in pitches thrown column (103). In his first four starts since returning from the elbow injury, Bradish seemed to start to tire earlier than you’d like.
In those outings, he was averaging only 4.2 innings and 83 pitches. Part of that may have been a deliberate attempt by Brandon Hyde and Drew French to not put too much stress on Bradish’s arm too soon, but there were also signs that Bradish was wearing down in the fifth. The fact that he looked as strong as he did into the seventh against the White Sox—while carrying his same velocity—points to a Kyle Bradish that is in full health.
And while projecting forward to October is a dangerous thing to do in May, this Orioles team is so good that it makes it hard not to have your mind drift toward the postseason. And with all due to respect to the trios of Cole-Gil-Schmidt in New York, Lively-McKenzie-Bibee in Cleveland or Lugo-Singer-Ragans in Kansas City, being able to roll out this version of Burnes-Bradish-Rodriguez to start a playoff series should make the Orioles the favorites in any potential matchup.
Bradish is also the wildcard of that group because of how versatile his approach is. While Burnes and G-Rod have fairly consistent plans of attack (cutter and curves for Burnes, four-seamers, changeups and sliders for Grayson), Bradish can and will vary his approach. If a team is particularly weak against breaking balls, don’t be surprised to see him throw 40+ sliders again. If the opposition tries to stack a bunch of lefties against him, good luck hitting all the sinkers living on the outside corners. Throughout Bradish’s young career, he’s proven that his remarkable command is the ultimate key to his success—and it is that success that can take this rotation and team all the way over the top.