Tony-OH

Age doesn't care about the route a pitcher took. It matters because of the amount of progression a pitcher makes at that age and beyond when it comes to command is typically minimal. Fruit has certainly put himself on the distant radar and probably deserves a promotion to AA to see how he does there, but I I've seen players like this that get write ups and suddenly he becomes a "prospect" in some fans eyes. He's shown improvements over his pretty bad numbers in college, but the one thing that is very similar is his K-BB ratio, which is not great. I'll go back and watch more of his latest starts to see if I see anything in the stuff that jumps out at me, but I'd like to see a little more domination and less walks for a guy pitching to much younger competition.

This makes no sense. Because there's a lot of attrition, he shouldn't have more of them to choose from? This is the EXACT reason why Elias should draft more pitching higher. He needs to have more arms ready to help in the farm, not relying on waiver wire fodder. I'm not saying he could have foreseen THIS many pitchers going down, but still, there's not a lot of legitimate help in the minors ready to help and that's go a lot to do with his drafting philosophy. As for Eflin, I'm encouraged that Hyde seems to think it's not that serious. Let's hope so. Obviously losing Eflin for any length of time or the playoffs would be a huge blow to this team's chances. Just a real tough year for injuries.

Well, let's looks at things: He's 24 years old in High-A ball He's walking 4.6 batter per 9. His FIP is 3.72 His xFIP is 4.07 Since July he's been very good But that 9% swinging strikes rate is low and it appears he still relies on batters to chase for misses. I think we need to wait to see how he does in AA before getting him too far up the list. He might be a late bloomer, but the walk rate against younger High-A hitters concerns me.

He gets both arm side run and a huge vertical drop. He just needs to land it enough for strikes to make major league batters respect it.

I've been watching a lot of Orioles minor league right-handed pitchers throwing changeups to right-handed batters this year with some success. I'm wondering if going against the proverbial wisdom that right on right changeups don't work is being challenged by the Orioles or just if it's a development thing. Young's changeup is definitely a plus pitch and his curveball can be at times too. I wouldn't mind seeing him throw that change up right on rihght more often though to see if it works in the upper levels.

New draftees placements are very preliminary.

Tracking purposes before Draftees.

They need to challenge Fabian in AAA, but I would not be surprised if he struggles once there offensively. I'm not sure I've ever seen him hit a breaking ball or high velocity fastballs up in the zone well. Hopefully he'll figure things out because he certainly a plus defender in the outfield and would fit very nicely in Slaters role at some point if he can prove he can hit lefties well enough.

While we've seen the limitations of this team currently, they're going to make the playoffs. Whether they win the division or not will depend on a lot of things, including whether the Yankees figure things out too. I guess the good news is that the Yankees are as flawed as the Orioles right now and the Orioles should get some reinforcements in the pen with Coulombe and Webb at some point in September. Whether this team gets better with runners in scoring position or not remains to be seen, but the Orioles clutchiness was not good once again yesterday, though Akin and Selby were good.

Pretty sure Elias was driving through an Amish village in Lancaster, PA when he saw Selby throwing rocks against a barn and signed him. He clearly had his best stuff in his debut last night. The knucklecurve is a high spin rate pitch. Looks like the Orioles had him ditch the low spin 4-seamer he was using with KC. He still can't land the knucklecurve in the zone very much but it was a nice pitch movement wise and did get whiff on one of the only two swings the six got. He had a few of these outings with Pittsburgh then would come out and have a clunker judging by his game logs last year. He was consistently inconsistent. Let's see how he looks the next time, but that was a nice debut.

Weird, 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position, yet the team comes back, only to see the bullpen give it up in a walk off. Stop me if your surprised.

And we've seen this first hand. He's just a cool character on that mound, and even when things are not going well, he doesn't seem to panic. He may be a 90-pitch starter, but he may even put that behind him a bit after hitting 97 on his 99th and final pitch yesterday. I really don't know where this team would be without him this year. Right now, he's the clear #3 starter on this team.

You have as much chance of pitching in the bullpen this year than Morfe. As for Kimbrel, we have seen him correct the ship before, but still I can't imagine "trusting him" again in closing situations barring a lack of availability of several other guys.

With all the young players coming up and the fact that O'Hearn was basically a waiver claim (purchased from the Royals), he gets overlooked by fans a bit, but what he's become is remarkably consistent. At basically the same amount of PAs (381 vs 368 last year), the lefty swinger has the exact same .801 OPS but with offense down this year, that gives him a 131 OP+ vs a 122 in last year. Now his power is down a little from last year, but his walks are up and his strike outs are down, so it appears he's trying to work getting on base more than power. And while he hasn't played a lot in RF, he's actually been pretty good out there with a 2 OAA, both on balls coming in and has a 3-star catch going back to his left. The worse balls that he did catch were two 4-star catches at 45% and 50% catch probability. Basically he catches everything that he should. Now his -3.5 ft/sec jump and 29.7 ft/sec is nothing to write home about which tells us if he did play out there more regularly I'd imagine that OAA would go down. His arm is a weak out there and he hasn't thrown anyone out, but runners are taking bases on him liberally. Now he's not a very good defensive 1st baseman though he won't kill the team out there. Overall though, when you look at his statcast leaderboard, he's having another solid season.

I find it interesting that Cowser's batting run value is -2, dragged down by his -6 RV against changeups. with 40.9% whiff rate against changeups and a 40.2 % against breaking balls, he's really going to have to work hard on picking up spin. His defense has been a huge part of his value according to statcats. I'm actually a little surprise that his arm value is 0 vs a negative value despite his plus, plus arm strength. He's the Coby Mayo of throwing accuracy from the outfield and runners have to know this by now. Runners attempt to advance on him -1% less than MLB average and have a normalish success rate of 98%. Actually looking at these stats, he's about right on par with Santander and even Mullins. Cowser's 10 OAA makes him tied for 6th in all of baseball for Outfielder OAA. He has 4 OAA going straight back which is tied with the Angel's Jo Odell for the best in all of baseball.

The loss of Coulombe and even Webb can not be overstated. They were two really reliable consistent relievers and they've been replaced by less reliable, inconsistent relievers. Elias clearly knew this at the trade deadline and did acquire two relievers, but unfortunately, Soto completely crapped the bed in two of his first 3 games as an Orioles. The good news is he's now had four scoreless appearances and has only allowed one hit and one walk over those 3.1 innings. Hopefully he's righting the ship. Dominguez has taken over as closer for now and looks to be a great pick up. So at least he addressed a need though it did cost him did two decent pitching prospects (Johnson and Chace) and Hays (who was not a loss IMHO). So the pen now looks like this: Closer: Dominguez HLR: Cano HLL: Perez MLR: Burch MLL: Soto LLR: Kimbrel LLL: Akin LR: Rogers MU: Selby Burch is kind of becoming a pumpkin and that is really the key for me, is to upgrade that Medium Leverage righty. McDermott might have been that guy but his injury ended that. Dillon Tate has been pitching well in AAA and is probably next up, but his stuff is not very good overall. Could Brandon Young be that guy? I don't know, but I'd be willing to give him a look at some point even without reliever experience. If Dominguez can keep it going, and IF Cano and Soto can refind it, and IF somebody out of Burch or Kimbrel can step up, maybe they can survive until Coulombe and Webb (Webb just started playing catch) come back. Maybe.

I think that's all fair. My post was meant to discuss and validate the lack of clutchness over the last 50 games. It was something a lot of had noticed, but Fangraphs stats allowed it to be quantified. Now, I agree with those who say that "clutchiness" can change, but I do think some guys just put too much pressure on themselves to do too much in those high leverage situations. That's why some relievers with great stuff can't close effectively. I also agree with the many folks who believe who the Orioles are in mid to late September into October is way more important than who they are right now, which is an inconsistent team that struggles in close games. The bullpen right now is a HUGE problem. Coulombe will hopefully help later in the year, but we don't know for sure. Even Dominguez scares me in one run games because of his penchant for giving up homers this year. If someone in the pen steps up or I should say, if several guys in the pen step up and become guys that will be huge. Until then, this team is going to break a lot of hearts late in games.

The Orioles trades Trey McGough as part of the deal for Jimenez. He has been lights out as a left-handed reliever this year in AAA. His stuff doesn't overwhelm you when you watch him but he's been pretty dang effective. I would feel much better about him coming up than Selby.

I'm sure Selby and his career 8.67 ERA in 27 major league innings and his 5.52 ERA in Triple-A between three organizations will be an absolute game changer for the Orioles bullpen. He's mostly a fastball curveball guy. The curveball has a ton of vertical movement but he doesn't throw is much for strikes and MLB and even Triple-A batters have been able to lay off the pitch. He clearly is a guy they can bring up for a few days and then DFA so I guess he's here to give some guys a break in the pen. Guess Hyde realizes he shouldn't run guys out three days in a row. These are the kinds of guys you have to use when you've never drafted and developed a major league pitcher.

The team we were in May and early June is long gone and it's times to face facts that this is not a slump, but what this team is at this point. When your 23-27 and your last 50 games, that's who you are currently. So the question is why is this team not very good and is there anything that can be done about it? Injuries This team has been decimated by injuries but according to Fangraphs they've only lost 4.7 fWAR to injuries this year which is 20th worse. Now I don't know how accurate that is but it does go to show that this team hasn't been bit by injuries more than most other contending teams. Losing Bradish, Wells, Means, Rodriguez, Coulombe, Mateo, and Westburg for significant amounts of time have certainly hurt, but out of them, only Rodriguez, Coulombe, Mateo, and Westburg have been out during this poor run and Rodriguez only for what, the last two weeks or so? So let's look at the players who replaced these four: Urias/Mayo for Westburg: Urias is who he is at this point and has slashed .229/.263/.400/.663 in 38 PAs since Aug 1st and we know Mayo was a disaster slashing .059/.200/.059/.259 in his short 20 PA stint. So the loss of Westburg has been pretty big. Suarez for Rodriguez: In the two starts Rodriguez would have made since (he would have pitched last night too but Suarez was pushed back to today) Suarez has not allowed a run 11.2 innings. So while we lose Suarez in the pen, where he hasn't exactly been nails, He has done well replacing Grayson. Mateo: Until bringing up Livan Soto the other day, the Orioles never have really replaced the utility expert but have gone with a series of infielders and outfielders as extra guys, none of which were ever used very effectively by Hyde and more of so less sat in the bench. Norby, Stowers, Maton, Kjerstad and more playing time for Urias all were his replacement. Perez/Soto/Krook/Vespi/Baker/many others for Coulombe: Now the biggest loss in my opinion was when Coulombe went down on 8 Jun. The Orioles have not been able to find another high leverage lefty to help in the pen so that means Perez got bumped up from his 6th/7t inning role to higher leverage. Now Perez hasn't been terrible in high leverage situations: But he absolutely struggles with two outs and runners in scoring position. His 27% inherited runners scored is the best of his career, but Coulombe hadn't allowed an inherited runner to score all season, stranding all 13 runners he inherited after having a 22% rate last season. We all know Soto has been an utter disaster for the Orioles, Vespi was more of a mop up guy, and Krook is a AAAA lefty. So in the end, losing Coulombe has certainly hurt. Clutch Hitting: The Orioles offense overall since June 21st (50 game stretch) has been the 4th best for fWAR (9.4) that is dragged down a bit by their -11.3 fWAR defense. But how clutch are they over this period? Well, according to Fan Graphs Clutch rankings, the Orioles are the 20th best clutch team. So how about that bullpen, how clutch are they? How about 24th or 6th worse in the MLB over this span. How many times has the bullpen just come in a shutdown the opponents in close games? As per fangraphs "A Shutdown is when a reliever accumulates greater than or equal to 0.06 WPA in any individual game. The number of Shutdowns are scaled to Saves + Holds, which is where the .06 thresholds originated." How about 27 of 30? So basically we have an offensive team and a bullpen that are anti clutch. This why this team is so frustrating to watch. Those close games and comebacks that the Orioles were known for last year has been replaced by one of the worse clutch teams in baseball. So basically we have a team that when they win, they do it without needing clutch situations to win. Luckily they do have an offense and a few starters that generally give them a chance to win like that. But when this team is in those tie games or down or up by one late, don't get your hopes up with this crew. So what can be done about this? Honestly, not much now that the trade deadline has come and gone. Elias' trades netted three guys who have helped in Eflin, Dominguez and Jimenez to a lesser extent, and two guys who have been disasters so far in Soto and Rogers. The Orioles are now living and dying with Urias at 3B, McCann starting more than he should because of Adley's back, and a bullpen that literally has not one guy you feel totally confident in coming in a shutting a team down. When you add in their unclutchiness, you get a team that is not a lot of fun to watch late in close games and there's not a lot Elias can do at this point but hope guys snap out of there funks and become the guys they were last year.

They are 100% a better team than this Orioles team.

It's terrible that Elias thinks his team is a contender running out this lineup against the Red Sox.

Just another unclutch player on a team full of them.

I've had an epiphany tonight. I was looking at the lineups on the jumbotron and realized, holy crap, the Red Sox are a much better offense. Then add in they are not clutch in any way, the bullpen is a dumpster fire of rejects and has beens, and the rotation is anchored by a guy who got shelled after his team fought back for him, and it made me realize. This team is not really very good. Like, this not a losing streak or guys struggling, this team is a .500 team at best that played well early, bit the regression is real. Oh, and the fact this team does not come back is just another point.

Well let's see who will be unclutch. Will it be banged up Adley or Mr. Uncouth himself Cowser? Maybe both?