With 13 days to go before Opening Day, the Orioles have their starting pitcher. The team announced before Friday’s spring training game against the Phillies that the dominant star from last year, Trevor Rogers, is getting the nod for the first start of the season.
On one hand, it’s no surprise that the guy who had a 1.81 ERA across 18 starts last season, who accumulated 5.5 bWAR in only 109.2 innings, is getting lined up as the #1 starter for the season. If he had performed like that over a full season, he would
have been an easy winner for the AL Cy Young award.
On the other hand, it’s at least a tiny surprise, if only because there’s also Kyle Bradish, who is longer-tenured with the team and still looked pretty ace-like in his return last year from Tommy John surgery. By starting Wednesday’s spring training game, Bradish appeared to be lined up for Opening Day on regular rest. The team has gone in another direction.
As of this writing, there has not been any official indication from manager Craig Albernaz about how he might line up his other starting pitchers. Given that there are six starting pitching candidates, he hasn’t even announced whether he will do a six-man rotation. For now, my best guess is that things will line up with Rogers followed by Bradish, Shane Baz, Chris Bassitt, and Dean Kremer, with Zach Eflin getting something like a two-week rehab stint at the start of the season to fully build up from last year’s back surgery.
The team has continually not indicated Eflin is behind schedule, though, so I’m starting to doubt that as the resolution. If nobody gets hurt between now and Opening Day, are they going to put Kremer in the bullpen? Send him to the minors? Though the #1 spot is resolved, many questions remain here. The Orioles probably have an idea internally what they’re going to do about these things, but they haven’t showed their cards yet.
