Tony-OH

Your hatred of Stowers as a player has been noted repeatedly. Please remember that when he's given an everyday chance somewhere and he ends putting up good numbers at the major league level. Yes, he has contact issues at times, but you pointing out his three games of stats since he's been back in AAA after basically being benched for almost two weeks shows your bias. At this point, we just have to see how it plays out.

The good news with Gunnar is that his XWOBA is at .325 which is major league average and his EV is in the 87th percentile. He's showing a plus plus eye at the plate with a 97th percentile BB rate and 72nd percentile chase rate. That suggests he should be better, but that plus eye is coming at the expense of getting deep in counts causing a high strike out rate and low XBA (4th percentile) and XSLG (22nd). He's taking 7% more pitches (35%-28%) in the heart of the strike zone than an AVG MLB hitter, so being a little more aggressive might be in his best interest. Now, saying that, his inability to hit breaking balls or offspeed is a bit concerning. He was not great at it last year either, but pitchers are not suddenly throwing him a bunch of non fastballs. He's seeing just 1.5% less fastballs this season so far, so really more it's about making good hard contact on those fastballs and making better contact on the non-fastballs. It was good to see him get more aggressive early in counts in yesterday's game. He's been a really bad two-strike hitter this year going 0-for-22, with 4 BBs and a HBP with 18 strikeout. Whatever the reason for the terrible wo strike approach, he probably needs to work on being more aggressive earlier in counts. I think he's going to be fine and just needs one of those breakout games to get him back on track but I do have continuing concerns about his ability to hit left-handed pitching. He struggled against them most of his minor league career but was given starts already against lefties, including Cortes who dominates lefties. Of course Urias would be seem to be the perfect choice to replace him against particularly tough lefties, but the Orioles signed Frazier to play second base when historically he's struggled against them as well. The Orioles seem to have a weird way of determining splits and platoons. They hated Stowers against lefties at the major league level yet he hit them his whole minor league career but have no issues starting Henderson or even Frazier (if Rf no less) against lefties. I don't get it. Either way, worrying about him hitting lefties is a secondary issue until he starts to hit righties better. White Sox have some tough starters coming up so this should be another test for him. He's gotten hits in each of his last two games (including a hustle 2B) so hopefully he's starting to get on track.

I don't necessarily agree with all of your statements here, but your post really fell off the rails by saying you'd rather have Stevie Wilkerson on this team than Vavra. Wilkerson hasn't played MLB since 2021 when he slashed .167/.211/.208/.419 with the Orioles and was fairly bad everywhere he played defensively. Vavra doesn't really have a carrying tool and it does make me wonder if there's enough OBP to overcome the other parts of his mediocre game, but he's not the worse 26th man. Now should have be making regular starts in the outfield, no really. He had a nice game yesterday and he's not a bad little ballplayer overall, but he's not starting material and he's not worse than Stevie Wilkerson.

The changeup has a better WHIF rate due to the horizontal movement, but the WHIF rates on his other pitches are down, mainly because he's not commanded them well enough to get guys to chase or swing through stuff. Batters seems to take his pitches just off he plate and that's because he hasn't been able to prove to them that he can land them in the zone enough on the shadow of the strike zone.

And despite not having his best command, he allowed just two runs over those six innings. Sounds like a pretty good pitcher to me. Either way, your analysis is tainted by your fandom. If Bassitt was signed by Elias and had two solid starts after the bad one, you would be all in and claiming how smart he was for signing him (I would have agreed with you). But since he was not, you now will try and find ways to discredit Bassitt even after a quality start. Gibson, who I was always fine in signing as back of the rotation starter to eat innings like Lyles did last year, is the only Orioles starting pitcher to go at least 6 innings this year (twice). Are you willing to tell everyone that this team would not be better with Bassitt in the Orioles rotation right now? He was not signed either because Angelos did not give Elias the budget to sign him, or Elias' risk aversion to signing any large pitching contracts led him to one year deals and low risk/mid reward trades like Irvin. I still don't know the answer to that question, but there is no way you can tell me the Orioles would not be a better rotation with Bassitt. Now back to Irvin, I had no issue with the trade and I think he will eventually be back up and better, so I'm not bashing the trade after three starts in April and a demotion. But I will continue to say that Elias' weak offseason is becoming more and more obvious. He wanted to liftoff, but the only think lifting off are balls hit by batters against this pitching staff. A pitching staff he knew needed to be upgraded and need a true TOR and #3 to be a serious playoff contender without having to catch lightning in a bottle again.

This post is right on point. For some reason Irvin lost his command so far and has not been able to do the one thing he was brought here to do, and that was to eat some innings and keep the team in games. He doesn't have the stuff to be a 12.7% walk rate guy and between that and getting hit hard (91 EV) he's allowing way too many base runners (1.97 WHIP). Now looking at his stuff from last year to this year, I saw three things that jumped out. He's throwing his sinker much less (22.9% vs 9.3% this year), he's been unable to bury his curveball low away to lefties or down and in on righties and it's getting hammered, and he's been unable to consistently throw his changeup for strikes low and away to lefties. Last year he had a decent 22.4 WHIFF rate on the curveball and this year it's just 5.6%, mainly because of the location. He's actually added 7.5 inches of horizontal movement on the curveball but he can't command it. In fact, all of his pitches have increased horizontal movement this year so it's not stuff, it's commanding that new movement. now the Orioles have clearly been teaching horizontal movement as we've seen several pitches adjust their pitch shapes to get more run, so it appears to me that the movement is working, but now Irvin needs to find out how to command it with the new movement. I betcha he ends up coming back and being decent for this team this year and doing what they signed him to do, and that's eat innings and keep the team in the game more times than not.

To be fair, Bassitt had that awful debut where he gave up nine runs in 3.1 IP against the Cardinals then put up two quality 6 innings starts. I certainly would have taken that. He's going to be fine and would have upgraded this rotation if the Orioles were serious about adding top talent, not mediocre ones in Gibson (though Gibson has been solid so far he has a career 94 OPS+) and Irvin.

Thanks. I can take a closer look at Cionel later. He's been pretty good until he just lost his heart during his last outing where he was clearly down after they scored. Then Hyde inexplicitly brought him back out down by 3 to waste him for several days. He clearly did not want to be out there and just threw up pitches that got beat around. Sometimes you have to read the body language of a pitcher and when guys are used to being in high leverage situations and then you run them back out for a 2nd inning down by 3, you get what you get. But that's for another thread.

He's been fantastic for sure, so I decided to look at his stuff a little closer. When you look at his pitch movement, spin rates, and extension, nothing stands out as amazing, especially with his slider that he throws 52.7% of the time. When you look at his slider, it's a high spin rate slider but it's vertical and horizontal movement are really below average for a slider thrown within 2 MPH of it's 85.7 velocity. So why the 34.6% whiff rate and lack of success against the pitch? Command and location appears to be part of the reason. He's burying the pitch down and away on lefties and down and in on righties mostly and his made very few mistakes. Now I don't know how to find the metrics on late movement, but while his slider has "below average movement" overall distance wise, it appears to have very late movement. He also seems to throw it differently at times. Sometimes he gets it to dive and sometimes it flattens out and it moves horizontally or looks a bit like a cutter. The question is, is this something he's doing on purpose or that's just what happens sometimes? https://www.mlb.com/video/00u7jzgkdtP9kH55c356/reels/danny-coulombe-slider?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share When you add his curveball, and sweeper into the mix, he's got a lot of different looks to his breaking ball. https://www.mlb.com/video/00u7jzgkdtP9kH55c356/reels/coulombe-s-strikeouts?partnerId=web_multimedia-search_video-share He's been a great find and credit needs to go to Elias and company on finding value for nothing.

Baseball nerds are a cooler version of nerds though! :D

Sweet, I'll take it..

Yeah, the smart move was to pinch run McKenna for Vavra, but Mateo would have been out on that throw.

Probably a 90% chance Bautista comes in and gives up a run with the way things have gone since the 3rd inning.

Nice throw.. Vavra is not fast...

Ha, no, that's a pop up! Gotta get to the outfielders to be a flyball.

I might've tried to safety squeeze with Cedric.

Yep, that last one was clearly ball 4.

Ouch baby, ouch...

C'mon, flyball here Mateo..

Well now it appears Bautista is warming, which makes the most sense.

We've seen this kind of game before. Get a lead, pitcher blows it. Get a bigger lead, pitcher blows it. Then stop hitting.

Sounds like Logan Gillaspie gets the 9th if they don't score in the bottom of the 8th. Sounds about right.

Kind of feel like you don't take your pitcher out of his rhythm with this challenge.

So Elias, how did your offseason go? "Well, in the 13th game of the season, the guy we acquired after he was going to be DFA'd will be pitching in the 8th in a 7-7 game against the worse team in the league." Gotcha!