Kyle Bradish Is Back, and He’s Hungry for Outs

If you’ve had to avert your eyes from the funeral pyre of the 2025 Baltimore Orioles, I feel ya. It has, at times, not been a pretty sight. But hope springs anew, as of Tuesday, with the return of Kyle Bradish to the Orioles’ rotation.

Bradish was a late-blooming prospect who only really put it together in his age-26 season, and was only at the top for a little over a season before he tore his UCL last June. Since Bradish went down, the Orioles’ pitching staff has weathered some even noisier crises: The departure of Corbin Burnes, a season-ending back injury to Zach Eflin, a season-ending (possibly multiple seasons-ending) shoulder injury to Félix Bautista, and ongoing elbow issues that have kept Grayson Rodriguez out of action all year. (I’m not comfortable calling Rodriguez’s injury season-ending, because the question of whether you can end something that never started is an ontological conundrum I’m not equipped to solve.)

The point is, the Orioles just got a pitcher back who, the last time he was healthy for a full season, finished fourth in Cy Young voting. The fourth-place finisher in the other league that year, Spencer Strider, had Tommy John within a couple months of Bradish, and when he came back earlier this year, it was a huge deal. (Just don’t ask how he’s been since his return.)

It’s only been one game, but the early returns are promising. Bradish went six innings and threw 81 pitches, allowing just four hits and no walks while striking out 10. It was just the fourth double-digit strikeout outing by an Orioles starter this year, and the first of those to come with zero walks. The last Orioles pitcher to strike out more than 10 batters in a game? Well, it was Bradish, in May of last year.

It’s like the universe was telling Bradish that he’d been missed.

Unfortunately for Baltimore, Lucas Giolito had his good changeup on Tuesday night. The big right-hander held the Orioles scoreless through eight innings, and hitless in five at-bats with runners in scoring position. Bradish, who allowed two earned, got saddled with the loss.

The first one I’m just going to show you, because the context is simply terrific. MASN’s Melanie Newman opened the second inning by quoting Bradish’s wife, Mollie, who had some really lovely things to say about her husband’s determination and perseverance on the long road back from Tommy John surgery.

Genuinely, I was getting a little emotional. If your partner doesn’t talk about you the way Bradish’s wife talks about him, you should take a long look at the state of your relationship. Unfortunately, while all this was going on, Bradish was winding up for his first pitch of the inning, which turned out to be a hanging slider.

The key to comedy is surprise, and the sudden transition from “My husband is so inspiring…” to “KABOOM” had me falling out of my chair laughing.

Trevor Story’s second-inning home run wasn’t exactly a moon shot; for a minute, it looked like it only went out because of the bizarre left field architecture at Camden Yards, but this ball traveled 372 feet and would’ve left every stadium in the big leagues. And with the first pitch of the next inning, Bradish left a two-seamer over the middle of the plate and David Hamilton lined it just over the big wall in right field.

So that’s two bad mistakes. Bradish threw seven middle-middle pitches, all either four-seamers or sinkers, in his comeback start. Hamilton’s home run was one of those. Story’s home run came off the only breaking ball Bradish left in Baseball Savant’s heart zone.

I don’t think it’s fair to characterize all of those as mistakes. The middle-middle sinker Hamilton hit out only had nine inches of horizontal break. When Bradish got his sinker to break 12 or more inches, which is where he lived most of the evening, the pitch proved to be a powerful barrel-misser.

Alex Bregman could’ve hit this pitch into the gap; instead, it fooled him just enough that he knocked it at his own toes. The result: an easy double play. And that was pretty typical. Here’s what happened to Bradish’s seven middle-middle fastballs: one home run, two first-pitch called strikes, three groundballs that hit the ground within seven feet of home plate, and a popup with a launch angle of 87 degrees.

Bradish’s most commonly used pitch, throughout his career, has been the sinker. And part of the reason his sinker works so well is that his four-seamer has natural glove-side cut, rather than arm-side ride. That’s how a low-90s fastball over the middle of the plate ends up tying good contact hitters — like Bregman and Masataka Yoshida — in knots.

What’s interesting about Bradish’s four-seamer is how many of them he threw: 24 in 81 pitches. That’s not leaps and bounds from the norm for Bradish, but it’s also the highest percentage of four-seamers for any start of his since May 2023. Bradish threw 21.1% four-seamers in his four Triple-A rehab starts, so maybe this is just an outlier, rather than the beginning of a deliberate emphasis on the four-seam fastball.

All that having been said, Bradish does not pay his mortgage with his fastballs. In his downballot Cy Young season of 2023, Bradish led the league in breaking ball run value. He had the third-most valuable curveball in all of baseball and the 11th-most valuable slider.

What makes Bradish’s two breakers so much fun (unless you’re in the batter’s box) is that while both pitches have better-than-average downward break, the slider has way more glove-side break than average, while the curveball has way less glove-side break than average.

In a game situation, Bradish usually throws more curveballs to lefties and more sliders to righties, but he’ll break out either pitch against almost anyone. So if a right-handed hitter senses that the ball is traveling at less than, say, 90 or 91 mph, it’s either going to drop out of the sky or it’s going to zoom off into the opposite batter’s box, and there’s no way to tell.

Even after six minor league rehab starts that got Bradish back up to just under 90 pitches, you could still see little specks of rust in his first game back in an Orioles uniform. There was the occasional misplaced fastball, and Bradish’s velocity dropped from 96 and 97 mph in the first inning to 92 and 93 in the fifth.

But the curveball/slider combo was just about perfect. Bradish threw 28 breaking balls, generating 11 — eleven! — whiffs on just 15 swings.

If your partner doesn’t feel about you the way I feel about Bradish’s curveball, you should take a long look at the state of your relationship.

These two breaking pitches burrow into a hitter’s mind, to the point where the mere threat of them is effective. Bradish only threw seven breaking balls in 25 two-strike counts, and those seven breaking balls only resulted directly in three punchouts.

The majority of Bradish’s strikeouts actually came on two-seamers, either dotted right at the bottom edge of the zone or running back over the inside edge for a called strike three.

The prettiest pitch in baseball is a big 12-to-6 curveball, but a front-door two-seamer for a called third strike is not too far behind.

The Orioles were surely hoping to see this version of Bradish return just as they were gearing up for a third straight playoff run, but it was not to be. Nevertheless, seeing Bradish pick up where he left off is an encouraging sign for 2026. And even though Giolito got the better of him in this pitchers’ duel, it was a genuine delight to watch.