The story of the 2025 Orioles is as much about who didn’t play because they were hurt as much as it is about how well players played when healthy. Grayson Rodriguez represents this idea taken to its most
extreme. He is a pitcher who the Orioles and fans were counting on to at least be a decent pitcher in the starting rotation. The way that the season played out, Rodriguez never threw a major league regular season pitch. His absence was heavily felt.
When spring training began, the biggest question around Rodriguez was whether he would be able to step up and be something like the top of the rotation pitcher that he was always believed to be capable of being. A secondary question was whether he would actually be able to pitch a full season worth of games, which he had not been able to do since lower in the minors early in his professional career.
The secondary question turned out to be the only question. Rodriguez did not make it past the single digit days of March in spring training without suffering an injury. At that time, he was diagnosed with triceps soreness for which he received a cortisone shot. That’s often one of the precursor injuries to an ulnar collateral ligament tear and Tommy John surgery. The Orioles insisted that the elbow inflammation wasn’t about the UCL. That is meaningless on its own; the initial diagnosis often proves optimistic.
After a while, Rodriguez started rehabbing the elbow, then he was shut down during that rehab because of soreness in his lat area. This was a recurring problem for Rodriguez, whose potential to debut in 2022 was cut short by an ill-timed lat injury. His 2024 season ended in July due to a lat strain as well. Rehabbing the lat was interrupted again by elbow soreness.
This all dragged out over months. Eventually, the explanation given was this: Rodriguez was suffering from bone chips in his elbow, which was the cause of the elbow pain. His attempts to rehab through that injury led him to tweak his throwing motion in such a way that it was placing more strain on the lat. There were vague intimations, though nobody ever stated outright, that this may have been a multi-year issue and that this is the explanation for why Rodriguez has been prone to lat injuries.
Rodriguez had surgery for the bone chips in August. That officially ended his season, confirming that he would never pitch for the 2025 team. Whether he would have taken that step forward this year or just continued more or less on his previous path is something we can never know and can only guess based on what we were already prone to believe about him.
One independent guess as to Rodriguez’s woulda-been 2025 came from the ZiPS projection system. The simulations from that system saw a middle-of-the-road outcome for Rodriguez bringing a 3.77 ERA as he made 22 starts. His 2025 season in that projection would have looked more or less just like his 2024 one did. That would have been disappointing for anyone who’s been waiting for Rodriguez to bloom into one of MLB’s ace pitchers. I get it. I’m one of those people. I wait for Rodriguez as I waited for Jake Arrieta and Kevin Gausman before him. We all remember that they both became better pitchers elsewhere.
As the season turned out, the Orioles could have quite desperately used even a “just like last year” Rodriguez in their rotation. There were so many injuries to deal with that the links in the causal chain don’t come together exactly, but I think with a little hand-waving we can say this: If Rodriguez had been healthy in spring training, the Orioles would have never needed to make the desperation signing of Kyle Gibson. Had Rodriguez been able to pitch about two-thirds of a regular season’s workload, the Orioles would also not have needed to try to plug that gap with Brandon Young.
Gibson only ended up making four starts with the Orioles. They were so bad, like 16.78 ERA level of bad, that he accumulated -1.1 bWAR and was released. Young was a more ordinary level of bad, finishing with a 6.24 ERA while making 12 starts this season. That is a -0.6 bWAR. The 2024 version of Rodriguez, who had 1.4 bWAR in 22 starts, pitching instead of those guys is a three-win swing for the 2025 team.
The team had enough other things go wrong that this isn’t the difference between making the playoffs and not. I do think there’s a real case to be made that having Rodriguez in April and May would have kept the team from sinking as low as they did early on. The other problems might have seemed less insurmountable at that point. Or maybe not. It would be a generous assumption to give the Orioles two more wins in each of those first two months from having Rodriguez in the rotation, and even with that generous assumption, they’re still 25-32 at the end of May.
One part of formulating the plan for this offseason is going to be figuring out how much they can count on Rodriguez next season. I think that the most prudent course of action would be for Mike Elias to build a Plan A for the Orioles 2026 starting rotation that essentially pretends that Rodriguez does not exist. Just don’t factor him in at all.
Get the top of the rotation guy that everyone knows they need and a back-end guy too, and count out a 1-5 that has no Grayson Rodriguez in it. If all five of those guys and Rodriguez are healthy through spring training, that’s a bridge they can cross when they get there. Maybe Rodriguez gets unsentimentally sent to Triple-A Norfolk so that he can prove that, after not having been in action since July 2024, he’s still got some juice. That’s a much better #6 starting pitcher for the organization than Young or Cade Povich. I will not be holding my breath for Elias to chart out that course of action.
The 2026 season is going to be the third of Rodriguez’s pre-arbitration years, so he’ll only cost the Orioles close to the MLB minimum salary, with modest raises to come afterwards until he could become a free agent after the 2029 season. He turns 26 next week. He’s long past being a hot prospect. He’s still young enough to keep dreaming about that next step forward. After last year, just pitching at all would be a big improvement.
