BLUF: Elias acquired a legitimate left-handed starting pitcher for a tweener prospect that plays a position of organizational depth.
Analysis: The first place I go to when the Orioles acquire a big league pitcher is Baseball savant to look at his stuff and on first look, if you go by his 2022 percentiles it doesn’t look very good.
But when you look at the results, things look a lot better:
The next step with to try and figure out how he has success and what jumped out at me was how much success he has with a low spin rate 90.7 MPH 4-seamer. He actually gets his best WHIFF rates from the pitch, but how? From what I see he gets 99% active spin and that must allow that pitch to play up. Consider Bruce Zimmermann’s 4-seamer is about 1 MPH faster but has just an 81% active spin despite having almost 400 more RPM on his spin rate than Irvin. Zimmermann’s fastball is absolutely creamed by major league hitters and he has just a 12% whiff rate.
Irvin also sinks the ball about 1 mph slower but they come out of the same “tunnel” so one kinda stays on plane more and the other sinks. I think that helps that 4-seamer play up.
The curveball and change are ok, but nothing special. Occasionally the curveball gets real good break horizontally and others times not as much which makes me wonder if he’s doing that on purpose or sometimes it just backs up on him.
Last year he pitched very well against lefties (.638 OPS) so I’d imagine teams will use righties against him which should help him with the Orioles cavernous dimensions in left and left center.
He slots in the rotation this year and gives them more innings that they can count on a bit. We have to remember that Grayson may only have 100-120 innings to give this year and Wells might be better in a relief role overall, so I’m good with giving the rotation that left-handed mix.
You can read more about Darrel Hernaiz by clicking on his name, but in summary, he’s a tweener guy for me who has a little upside to be a starter, but has to develop more consistent game power to move into a starter role. Then, where does he play because he doesn’t have the arm strength for SS and has accuracy problems everywhere on the diamond.
Could he put it together at 2B and become a guy, perhaps, but he’s worth getting a cheap major league starter who should give the team 180 innings of average major league pitching out of the rotation.
I don’t know much about Kyle Virbitsky but when I take a longer look I’ll let you know.
Overall, I like this trade as it improves the team, but it pretty much closes the door on the Orioles bringing in an impact starting pitcher this offseason.