The Orioles farm system has a number of prospects who did some truly exciting things in the course of the 2025 season. The organization added a wave of intriguing talent in the July amateur draft and still
another wave as it traded away veteran players from a failing team going nowhere to stock up on prospects. It wasn’t all positive. Some guys suffered career-derailing injuries and others flamed out spectacularly. The good and the bad understandably took up a lot of the focus. Easy to forget in the middle are guys who are plugging along. One of these prospects is Creed Willems.
This is a crucial offseason for the 22-year-old Willems, a lefty batter who’s split his pro career between catcher and first base. The Orioles drafted Willems out of the Texas high school ranks in 2021, giving him an overslot bonus of $1 million as an eighth round pick. That timing means that Willems becomes eligible for the Rule 5 Draft this winter. The O’s will have to decide whether they want to place him on the 40-man roster to protect him from being plucked away by another team.
Since arriving in the organization, the pattern that Willems has generally followed is this: He arrives at a new level while he is fairly young for that level. He struggles at that level. He repeats that level the next season and does much better, earning a promotion and repeating the cycle.
In 2024, this meant that Willems started out at Aberdeen, where he struggled for more than half a season the year before. A .238/.332/.456 line in 82 games – solid numbers for Aberdeen, as you know if you were following the failure of so many 2024 picks there this year – got him up to Double-A for a few weeks closing out the year. Assigned to the Arizona Fall League, where as a 21-year-old he was a bit younger than his competition, Willems posted an .891 OPS in 19 games. If he hit the ground running from there this season, he would have been a guy worth watching.
What we got instead from Willems in the 2025 season is batting that brings to mind Stringer Bell’s rant about forty degree days. Willems hit .253/.338/.441 in 105 games for the Double-A Chesapeake Baysox, with 16 home runs. Ain’t nobody got nothing to say about a forty-degree day, nor about a .779 OPS at Double-A. It’s perfectly fine. Against major leaguers, it’s another story: That would have trailed only Ryan O’Hearn, Ramón Laureano, and Gunnar Henderson on the 2025 Orioles. It’s just that it’s not so easy to port Double-A numbers up to the majors. Triple-A competition is tougher and major league opponents are tougher still.
Digging just a little bit deeper into Willems’s batting, what we find is a player who, like many young left-handed batters, has particular struggles with his same-handed platoon split. In each of the past two seasons, Willems has OPSed over .800 when facing right-handed pitching while ending up in the .600s against southpaws. My philosophy on platoon splits is that if you’re going to suck against one type of pitcher, it might as well be lefties, because there aren’t as many of them out there.
If it is to be as a platoon player that Willems slots in Baltimore or elsewhere, the question of what positions he can credibly platoon will be important. Can the guy come off the bench and be a decent enough catcher that he could back up that position? At FanGraphs, where Willems checked in as the #31 prospect in the Orioles system in April, Eric Longenhagen wrote this:
He’s a pretty good receiver and pitch framer, and his throwing accuracy helps his pedestrian arm strength play, but his ball-blocking is pretty bad. Pitchers with really nasty stuff that tends to finish in the dirt might be tough for Willems to catch … (he should overcome this) frequently enough to enable Willems to catch some of the time, get the occasional 1B/DH start, and be a potent bench weapon.
Using this same list as a reference, there was apparently some progress made during 2024, because FG wrote last year that Willems “badly needs to improve as a ball blocker and receiver.” No change on the ball-blocking front, but he’s moved up to “pretty good receiver,” so that’s something. Of course, this skill will mean a bit less in the era of ball/strike challenges. The report on Willems doesn’t have any star upside in there. If he can, in fact, be a “potent bench weapon,” that’s valuable for somebody.
As far as a possible fit with the Orioles goes, the O’s just signed lefty-batting catcher Samuel Basallo, who is 14 months younger than Willems and who like Willems needs to work on blocking pitches in the dirt, to an eight-year contract extension. If Willems is going to end up as a platoon bat who can back up the catching position, Basallo isn’t a very likely platoon partner. They’re the same side of the platoon.
Willems is a prospect who I’ve had a soft spot for since he was drafted. The decision to give him that $1 million bonus was largely panned by the cadre of prospect-focused writers across mainstream publications, with more than one making unflattering comments about his physique. There’s nothing to get me fired up to like an Orioles prospect so much as him having the potential to stick it to the haters. He also has a mom who is dedicated to liking every social media post about him. I want every prospect whose mom quietly likes our minor league posts to do well.
Doubly fun is that between his having a certain resemblance to the Kenny Powers character on “Eastbound and Down” and his first name also being the name of a rock band, writing about him gives a lot of potential for pop culture references. Unfortunately, none of the things I mentioned in either of the last two paragraphs has any connection to whether a player is any good or not.
All of which brings us back around to the question of whether Willems should or will be protected from the Rule 5 draft before this year’s deadline to do so. Can the Orioles afford to spend a 40-man roster spot on a platoon catcher who is the same side of the platoon as their top prospect? On top of this, Willems is likely not arriving in Baltimore until the 2027 season, and that’s assuming that he conquers Triple-A Norfolk with his bat in 2026, which is not guaranteed.
A guy whose bat is probably not big league-ready and who doesn’t currently have defensive capability to make him a useful bench guy may not be all that likely to stick with another team all next season. The risk of leaving Willems off is probably lower than for some other players – relief pitchers especially – who a bad team could use right away. That’s in Mike Elias’s hands to decide now. I’ll keep on rooting for Creed to take us higher, to a place with a gold trophy.
Tomorrow: Enrique Bradfield Jr.
