The Orioles never seemed like they were entirely sure what to do with Tyler Wells. Count him as a starter for a potentially competitive rotation? Stick him in the bullpen and let him rip? It went back and forth for a while, with a long layoff due to Tommy John surgery in the middle there. Heading into 2026, the O’s had finally committed to Wells as a reliever. The results were so great that when trade deadline season arrived, Wells generated enough interest that the Orioles “had to” trade him.
They
didn’t actually have to trade Wells, of course, just like they didn’t have to trade Adley Rutschman or Dean Kremer. They could have held onto him if they believed he could be a good part of the 2027 Orioles bullpen. Mike Elias decided that getting back one of the prospects he traded to the Rays in the Shane Baz deal – pitching prospect Michael Forret – was worth parting with Wells. The 6’8” righty went on to pitch in the World Series with his new team.
It’s not much surprise that Wells had managed to bring about trade interest. He was getting masterful results that were getting better as the season went along. By July, Wells was frequently in the mix of where you could call him the Orioles closer, or at least an Orioles closer. He pitched 14 games that month, picking up four saves and a win. Wells went multiple innings more than once. He had a 1.10 ERA in July.
That’s probably what did it for the trade interest. Other teams would want Wells, not just for the rest of this season but knowing they could control him for 2027 for relatively cheap – projected around $4 million. Elias would be tempted to think it was the time to sell high on a potentially volatile relief asset. That’s what he ended up doing, bringing back a pitcher who was at the Triple-A level and could be close to making a difference for the MLB team.
The thing about Wells that makes him volatile is that he is an extreme fly ball pitcher. This was already true prior to this year, when Wells was typically at a ground ball rate around just 33% for his career; average pitchers are usually in the low-40s. Zack Britton, at the peak of his powers for the Orioles in 2016, had a ground ball rate of exactly 80%. For pitchers, ground balls are great. They’re most often outs. The hits are typically singles and they definitely don’t end up as homers.
In 2026, Wells ended up with a ground ball rate at 26.5%. Among pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched, Wells was literally in the bottom 5 in the league for ground ball rate. For a pitcher who was as homer-prone as Wells had been before this season, that’s a real potential problem area. There’s a small margin for error there. Slip just a little bit and you’re giving up dingers left, right, and center.
Wells mostly did not slip up this year. Just 8% of his fly balls allowed went for home runs, close to a third less than the league average of about 11%. There is an element of luck to this that will probably not carry over into 2027.
Yet there was a lot of skill and a lot of good pitching too. Wells’s Statcast page for 2026 has a whole heck of a lot of red. He was great at getting batters to swing at pitches outside of the strike zone, great at getting them to swing and miss, great at avoiding walks, and great at not having batters hit the ball hard. All of these are good ways to avoid giving up a lot of homers! Assuming you can duplicate this – which, with the Rays, his odds are probably better than if he’d stayed with the Orioles.
All of this allows Wells to succeed even when some of the predictive stats don’t believe in him as much. Counting his time with both the Orioles and Rays, Wells had a 2.38 ERA. That puts a reliever among the game’s elite for that season.
With Fielding Independent Pitching, a stat that tries to take defense out of the equation by just considering what a pitcher can control, Wells was at a still decent but much less exciting 3.38. A stat that spins further off of this, xFIP, which normalizes the home run rate, put it higher at 4.03. Make that number an ERA and that’s basically Anthony Nunez’s season-long number in 2026. Not much interesting about any reliever with a 4+ ERA.
What’s the real Wells for 2027 going to be? If he loses just a little bit of the edge going into his age 32 season, it could go a lot worse for him. If he duplicates this, Elias could end up looking like an idiot. It wouldn’t be the first time, even if we limit the discussion to the Orioles trading a reliever to the Rays.
Maybe both teams will be happy with what they get out of the trade, if Forret becomes some kind of solid pitcher for the Orioles – maybe as soon as next year – and Wells helps the Rays again next year. There are such things as win-win trades out there.
