One of the defining aspects of the 2025 Orioles season is the sheer number of players who shuffled through the roster. Many of those who were involved in tying the MLB record for most players used in a season (70)
are players who you’d never thought about, who started the season outside of the organization, who came in and were thrown to the wolves. Many such guys shuffled back off the roster after getting their butts kicked. A smaller number seemed like they might be worth keeping around. Dietrich Enns was one of the unlikely maybe-keepers.
The 34-year-old Enns was about as journeyman as a journeyman gets going into this season. Since being drafted by the Yankees in 2012, he played in four different organizations, combining for just 11 MLB games through 2021. More recently, he jumped over to Japan and Korea before returning to the US for this season. I always find this type of story charming, the grinder who just keeps at it and hopes to make it back to MLB. The Orioles found a similar guy for their 2024 roster in Albert Suárez, who unfortunately wasn’t healthy enough to write a second chapter this season.
It wasn’t even the Orioles who signed Enns to a minor league deal as he came back over here. He was with the Tigers. The O’s plucked him out of Triple-A Toledo in exchange for cash considerations at the trade deadline. This could have easily turned out like Grant Wolfram, Matt Bowman, Scott Blewett, Corbin Martin, Carson Ragsdale, or Cody Poteet, a list of players who were either swiftly booted from the roster after bad first impressions or were bad enough that they would have been swiftly booted in better circumstances.
Enns was able to write a different story about himself than those other guys did. The Orioles plugged him in as a multi-inning reliever from his very first outing with the team, starting in the fifth inning as Brandon Young fell apart and pitching into the seventh. The next time out, he pitched two scoreless innings against the Phillies. In all, 11 of Enns’s 17 outings with the Orioles went beyond one inning. This was something that the O’s lacked for most of the season, as their first plan for this role (Suárez) got hurt in his first game and disappeared until September.
These were not all flawless outings. Not even 2016 Zack Britton had a 0.00 ERA. Enns took the loss in a couple of games and had a couple more that he made more interesting on the way to a hold or save. Other days he was the hero, particularly pitching two scoreless extra innings against the Pirates on September 9, and recording a three-inning save with a scoreless outing against the White Sox on September 15.
In all, Enns posted a 3.14 ERA, 3.73 FIP, and 1.326 WHIP in his 17 games pitching with the Orioles. Only three relievers who pitched at least ten games with the O’s this season had a lower ERA than that: Félix Bautista, Kade Strowd, and Rico Garcia. He had a better ERA than every reliever who was dealt by the team and was in the same ballpark for some with FIP and WHIP.
With the group of pitchers the Orioles carry over into the 2026 roster, it is worth putting Enns’s name in pencil when building next year’s Orioles bullpen, as long as he’s no higher than like, the fifth-best reliever the team puts out there. If you’re feeling generous, you might even say fourth. Probably it will be a bad sign for the 2026 Orioles if Enns is regularly getting high-leverage protect-a-lead innings. He isn’t an arm who can be optioned to the minors, so if it falls apart for him early on, the team will have to decide if they want to move on.
One thing I find interesting about Enns is that he kind of defies type a bit. By that I mean, you hear “lefty reliever in his 30s” and you’re probably thinking this guy has like, no fastball. The classic “crafty lefty” type. Discarded 2023-24 Oriole Danny Coulombe fell into that group, averaging a whopping 90.3mph on his fastballs, according to Statcast. While no one will mistake Enns for the kind of fireballer that every successful team seems to have make up half of its bullpen, he is throwing heat in comparison to the crafty lefty, coming in at 93.9mph. That’s a respectable enough velocity, especially considering he’s coming from the left side.
The question for Enns will be whether he can repeat this “you know what, that’s totally fine” level of performance in 2026. Some guys end up as fun one-year wonders, never to be able to live up to that again. Enns didn’t even get the full year to prove himself around here. The sample sizes were not large, but his Statcast page offers some encouraging peripheral numbers.
What it all adds up to is this: Enns did very well at keeping batters from squaring up the ball and hitting it hard. Limiting hard contact allowed him to survive even though he didn’t get a high number of ground balls. He had batters chasing pitches outside of the strike zone at excellent rates and did well enough getting them to swing and miss. If he cuts back on, or improves, his bad pitches (a cutter and sinker that weren’t getting the job done,) he could have an interesting fastball-changeup mix for going one time through the order. We will see if the new manager brings along new coaches and if those guys try to tweak Enns’s arsenal in any way.
The Orioles are going to need to do much better than Enns for a back end of their bullpen that needs to be built up almost entirely from scratch. They could do a lot worse than him (and quite possibly will) for the role he mostly occupied after joining the team in 2025.
Tomorrow: Brandon Young
