Trevor Rogers is your Most Valuable Oriole for the 2025 season. That is a sentence no one would have predicted back in spring training, or even as late as Memorial Day, when Rogers had put up a 7.71 ERA
through his first five minor league starts after dealing with a knee injury that delayed the start of his season. Once Rogers joined the MLB rotation for good in June, there was no looking back. He’s been amazing and he was the only deserving choice for this award.
The only thing holding back Rogers from being a unanimous selection for AL Cy Young is that he’s only made 17 starts. It’ll be 18 before season’s end. Despite this, Rogers has accumulated 6.0 bWAR, putting him in third place among AL pitchers, trailing only reigning Cy winner Tarik Skubal and Houston’s Hunter Brown. If Rogers has a good final start and ends up with 6.2 bWAR or higher, he’ll have the best Orioles starting pitching season since Mike Mussina’s 8.2 WAR in 1992.
In his 17 games, Rogers has pitched to a 1.35 ERA and 0.872 WHIP while averaging close to 6.1 innings per start. He is dominating everyone, and doing so in a way that peripheral stats support being able to continue. For instance, the Fielding Independent Pitching number, which attempts to measure events within a pitcher’s control (rather than those influenced by his defense), puts Rogers at 2.42. Camden Chat’s John Beers wrote earlier today about where Rogers’s season ranks in among some of the greats in Orioles history.
It has been a long time since a pitcher won the MVO for a given season. Like, a really long time. The last pitcher to be awarded was Rodrigo López, all the way back in 2002. This is not the only illustration of what pitching has been like for this franchise over the last two decades, but it’s definitely part of the picture.
Each year’s Most Valuable Oriole award is given out based on balloting by press who cover the team. Voters are given three choices on a ballot with a basic 5-3-1 point system. The team neither reveals what the results are nor who the voters actually are, beyond announcing the winner and a list of players who also received votes. Camden Chat does not get invited to participate.
This year’s list of “also receiving votes”:
Dylan Beavers, Dylan Carlson, Colton Cowser, Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday, Dean Kremer, Tomoyuki Sugano, and Jordan Westburg. Additionally, some person voted for interim manager Tony Mansolino.
Anyone who reads the list of names above will naturally wonder one thing: How in the world could someone vote for Dylan Carlson for MVO? The outfielder is sitting on a .205/.277/.340 batting line in 81 games and has generated -0.9 bWAR. Here’s my guess: The drop-down box was alphabetized by first name and someone wasn’t paying attention and voted for the wrong Dylan. I offer this promise to the Orioles: I’d take voting more seriously than that.
There are some head-scratcher votes that must have other explanations beyond inadvertent user error. Voting for Mansolino when that’s definitely against the spirit of the award and maybe even against the letter is weird. Listing Cowser is also weird, since he hasn’t been good and only played about half of the season.
Henderson, obviously, was the only acceptable runner-up choice, and you could go a variety of different ways for a third place vote. (Since the award wasn’t announced as unanimous, someone(s) even picked Henderson over Rogers.) If players who were traded away aren’t eligible (seemingly they aren’t), it’s not easy to pick who goes after Rogers and Henderson. Kremer and Sugano get some points for lasting the whole season in the rotation while not being completely horrible. Holliday and Westburg have their positives along with some warts. Beavers has done very well since arriving.
Rogers’s win breaks Henderson’s streak of MVO wins. Gunnar was MVO for each of the last two seasons before this. If not for Rogers’s dominance, it would have been an easy three-peat, even for all that this has been a disappointing year for Henderson. The main source of disappointment is losing more than 100 points of OPS since last year. He hasn’t homered since August 24 and probably won’t even get to 20 a year after having 37 homers. Having a player where a 5-win season feels like an off year isn’t bad. It will be nice if Henderson can get back to 7+ wins and 30+ homers next year.
The Orioles will recognize Rogers’s MVO win with an on-field ceremony ahead of tonight’s game against the Rays.
