Starting pitcher Zach Eflin signed a 2026 contract for $10 million with a mutual option for 2027 on Sunday night. The 31-year-old right-hander, who had back surgery in August, talked about his rehab, his decision to return to the Orioles and more in a video conference call with reporters on Monday.
Here are excerpts:
On his progress after surgery: “I’ve been doing some mound work, and I think I have my first bullpen scheduled on January 6th. So everything’s been going smooth. And as of now my goal is to be ready for Opening Day for the first start of the season. It could change. I don’t know. We still have another month and a half to go until I get to spring, but I feel better than I ever have in my life and I’m fully prepared to be ready for that first week of the season.”
On having surgery: “It’s been like a long thing that I’ve dealt with. I originally hurt it probably 10 years ago and throughout my entire career it’s kind of progressively gotten worse and I never thought it would get to the point where I needed surgery. But pretty much been on the IL every year of my career at some point for my back during the year, and this is the first year that I haven’t been able to manage it. And it came back, which it’s never come back twice in one year. I’ve always been able to manage it and this year I physically couldn’t do it.
“Felt like something was blocking me from being able to just be active, and I think they went in there and found some sort of bone spur that was kind of pushing into my nerve, so that explains a lot. But I’ve never thought surgery really was an option. I had gotten an epidural and figured that was gonna clean everything up and I was gonna pitch right after that, and that wasn’t necessarily the case. So I think the last option was to kind of get it cleaned up. And talking with the surgeon and talking with a lot people who have had it before, they’ve had really good success and have come back stronger and with more mobility and everything.
“So at the stage of my career that I was at and the pain that I was going through, it just kind of made sense to go and clean it up, because it wasn’t gonna be a year-long recovery, 18-month recovery. It was like a four-to-eight-month window of, hey, you’re gonna be feeling much, much better. And even out of surgery, obviously sore from being cut open and stuff, but it was a night-and-day different. I didn’t have that shooting nerve pain.”
On the 2026 Orioles: “I think everybody’s pumped for the season. I think the moves have been great. I mean, you’re adding to a team that’s already so talented, and some of those guys are some of my closest friends in the game. Speaking to Taylor Ward, we grew up playing Little League, travel ball, all that stuff together. So it’s really cool to be able to share a same jersey with him. Just being from the same hometown as him and [Ryan] Mountcastle, that stuff is special.
“The moves that they’ve made, it’s a win-now thing. We want to win the World Series, and everybody on the team knows that. Clearly, they’re making it obvious that we’re going to make a run at this thing. So it was very attractive to come back. It wasn’t a secret or anything. I wanted to come back. We had conversations, even before all those moves.
“I love the guys on the team. I love the staff. I love the front office. It’s such a fun place to go to work every day, especially when you spend so much time away from your kids and your family, and us having four under 4, it’s really hard to be away. But to surround yourself with the competitors that are on that team that are amazing baseball players but are even more amazing people, I’m very blessed to have the opportunity to come back and just very thankful.”
On options besides the Orioles: “There were some real options, I can’t lie about that. I didn’t know where I was going to be. Going through back surgery and cutting close to the spine, the first thing I needed to take care of was the quality of life and me being a father and a husband and getting back to being able to be a good dad. Everything else, I felt like, was going to take care of itself as I kind of built up and started to feel better.
“I thought, ‘I really feel like I’m going to be able to go out healthy and pitch a full season,’ and I think, at that point, everything started to pick up a little bit. I’ve been throwing since early November. But at the end of the day, like I told you guys, I wanted to come back, it wasn’t a secret. And to be able to have an opportunity to come back after kind of everything that I put the organization through is just a tremendous blessing, and I just felt the loyalty kind of speaking to me.
“The last thing I wanted to do was be the guy they traded for and get hurt and not be the guy that they wanted, and that really weighed on me throughout the whole process of getting surgery. Like I missed the last six weeks of the season, I wasn’t around the guys, I was kind of just bedrest, stuck in St. Pete, not really doing anything, kind of in a dark place. But to kind of fast forward to this moment is all worth it, because I feel like I’m going to be fully prepared to go out there and compete with the guys every single day and surround myself with people that want to better each other, and I’ve just been very blessed and thankful.”
Call for questions: I answer Orioles questions most weekdays. Please send yours to: Rich@BaltimoreBaseball.com.