The Orioles obtained six new players at the trade deadline, and on the whole, the trades look good.
Last season, the Orioles were conservative at the trade deadline, and with a 65-41 record at the time, perhaps they should have gone bigger. (Not, like, in height, because their two main pickups, Jack Flaherty and Shintaro Fujinami, are 6’4” and 6’6.” But neither pitched well for the Orioles, and we should probably pass over their time in Baltimore without further comment.)
This season, with seven pitchers on the injured list and several others on the 40-man looking a little shady (Craig Kimbrel, Dillon Tate, Bryan Baker, Keegan Akin, we’re looking at you), the Orioles needed pitching reinforcements badly.
And indeed, the Orioles front office went “bigger,” but still not in terms of star power. Instead, they went for quantity, scooping up a whopping six players at the trade deadline (plus outfielder Cristian Pache, who came and went). The new additions: Gregory Soto, Zach Eflin, Trevor Rogers, Eloy Jiménez, Austin Slater, Seranthony Domínguez.
Based on this batch of acquisitions, it’s safe to assume that the Orioles mission was to add competent outfield depth, shore up the bullpen, and stabilize the rotation.
We’ve had two weeks with the new additions. How is that mission looking so far?
Let’s go in order from smallest to largest role.
Eloy Jiménez seems surprisingly old for his 27 years, perhaps because his foot speed is in the bottom 6% of the League. The right-handed hitting DH/outfielder made his MLB debut with the White Sox in 2019 and finished fourth in the ROY voting. Since then, his star has dimmed, and his power has decreased, but he still has a nice bat, with hard-hit rates in the 92nd percentile of all hitters. So far with Baltimore, he hasn’t gotten a ton of usage, but the early returns are good: he’s hitting .480 in nine games totaling 25 at-bats, although of his twelve hits, only two are for extra-bases. Dealt in the trade for Jiménez was Trey McGough, a lefty the O’s picked up off waivers from Cleveland. McGough was having a good year, 4-0 with a 1.79 ERA in Double-A and Triple-A, but he wasn’t really on my radar for a call-up to the bullpen.
Overall, Eloy Jiménez feels a little like a luxury signing—I guess it’s good to have a righty DH to spell Ryan Mountcastle and Anthony Santander—but we didn’t give up a ton for him, either.
Austin Slater to me feels like Ryan McKenna with more upside at the plate. He’s got low chase rates and is prolific at taking walks, two things the offense has been lacking of late. The veteran outfielder was traded twice this season, once from San Francisco and again from Cincinnati on July 31, from where he came over on July 31 along with SS Liván Soto for a player to be named later.
So far, he’s hitting like he likes it in Baltimore, with a .400/.471/.533/1.004 slashline in 15 at-bats. BaseballSavant rated Slater a slightly plus defender in 2023, but a negative one in ’24. Still, he has 70th-percentile foot speed, so things could be worse as he takes reps in the gigantic left field Austin Hays used to patrol. At 31 years of age, Slater is a finished product, and it’s hard to get too excited about a career .254 average/.733 OPS. Whether this is a good trade depends on who the PTBNL ends up being, but for now, Slater is OK as a right-handed option offering competent outfield defense.
The Gregory Soto trade has looked pretty bad so far, the 29-year-old lefty having given up eight runs in 3.1 IP, good for a ridiculous 21.60 ERA as an Oriole. It’s not so much what the team gave up—Aberdeen reliever Moisés Chace (3.46 ERA in 17 games) and oft-injured Bowie pitcher Seth Johnson (2.63 ERA in 18 games)—as the fact that the Orioles need bullpen stability now. Soto will probably average out to something closer to his 4.42 career ERA or hopefully his 4.08 ERA in 43 games this season with Philly. He has a great fastball and pitched brilliantly in an 8-pitch scoreless inning on Tuesday. But he’s still walk-prone: his career average is 4.9 per game. I don’t feel massively confident.
Seranthony Domínguez is another former Philly who needed a change of scenery. But his career 3.46 ERA is a run lower than Soto’s, and Domínguez is still striking out 10.3 hitters a game, close to his career highs. Plus his peripherals are great (xERA, xBA, hard-hit percentage) and the contact allowed has been weak. As a result, Domínguez has temporarily purloined the closer spot from Craig Kimbrel and, along with Burch Smith (a 2.84 ERA and 0.79 WHIP since mid-July) he’s made a meaningful difference to the bullpen.
Now for the starters. Left hander Trevor Rogers is presumably meant to make up for the loss of John Means to Tommy John a second time. Rogers had a decent 4.23 ERA in five seasons with Miami, which includes one All-Star season in 2021, where he was kind of fabulous: a 2.64 ERA/1.15 WHIP with 157 strikeouts in 133 innings.
But as an Oriole Trevor Rogers has allowed twelve runs in 14.1 innings, a 7.71 ERA in three starts. What’s worse is that if you watch him pitch, he looks exactly like a guy with a 7.71 ERA, walking too many, leaving too many 90-mph-somethings in the zone, struggling to finish off hitters. His fastball has lost nearly three mph of velocity since his All-Star 2021, going from a +16 run value pitch to -2. His peripherals are all bad, except for ground ball percentage. He isn’t a free agent until 2027, but unless the Orioles coaches figure out a way to radically remake his arsenal, what’s the point? This one hurts, because the Orioles gave up two MLB-ready prospects, Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, for Rogers, and so far I’ve never seen him look good.
Lastly, there’s Zach Eflin. This is looking like a sneaky-brilliant signing, as the righty is 3-0 with a 2.33 ERA in 19 innings. His only flaw, such as it is, is not striking out too many hitters, but he’s limiting walks and giving up very weak contact. His pitching coaches, which, kind of touchingly, includes Tampa Bay’s Kyle Snyder, who called O’s pitching coach Drew French after the Eflin deal to share data, seem to have fiddled with two things: one, Eflin is throwing his cutter more against righties and two, he’s working in his changeup: from 4.3% early in the season he’s throwing it 14.5% of the time now.
So how did the team do at the deadline? The to-do list, again:
· Add outfield depth that can hit: Yes, but hopefully there aren’t too many games where Austin Slater and Eloy Jiménez are critical to the outcome.
· Shore up the bullpen: Check, especially if Gregory Soto can be made to throw strikes.
· Shore up the rotation: Half-credit. If Grayson Rodriguez comes back 100% in September, you could do worse than Corbin Burnes, Rodriguez, Zach Eflin, Dean Kremer and Albert Suárez in the rotation.