Heading into the season, the bullpen was probably the area of the Orioles that worried me the most. There were not enough proven arms and the one big signing Mike Elias made to address it, Ryan Helsley, was fresh off a horrible final two months of the season. This could have been really bad! At times, it was really bad.
Yet when the dust settled on the 2026 campaign, the Orioles had the 11th-best bullpen ERA of all teams in MLB. It wasn’t smooth the whole way, but on the whole this group was good
enough that if the rest of the team had held up its end of the workload, they wouldn’t have been a drag on a contender, especially by the end of the season when several unexpected names had emerged into solid contributors.
In this week’s episode, I work my way down the list of relievers, from two one-gamers all the way up to Rico Garcia, to see who contributed, who was a mess, and who should and will be back next year. Give it a listen here:
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