The Orioles Used To Be Bad, Ish; Now They Have Kyle Bradish

As the Orioles emerge from their long hibernation, it’s easy to see the things they’ve done well as an organization. They’re great at developing relief pitchers. They can walk through a public park and pluck a future star infielder from a tree. But starting pitching has not come as easily. The front end of the rotation lacks a pitcher like Gerrit Cole or Kevin Gausman, and they’ve had to bring in veterans like Cole Irvin and Kyle Gibson to carry some of the load. No doubt this is part of the reason they’re being linked to Shohei Ohtani, who for all the dinger sockin’ he does is still the best pitcher on the trade market at the deadline.

But the cupboard is hardly bare, thanks to pitchers like Kyle Bradish.

In contrast to his more celebrated position player teammates, Bradish’s trip to the majors was neither brief nor preordained. A fourth-round pick out of New Mexico State in 2018, he signed for less than slot value and embarked on what would seem to be a thankless journey through the minors, first with the Angels and then, after being included in the Dylan Bundy trade in 2019, with the Orioles.

It’s fun to go back and read the reports on a player who’s exceeded expectations the way Bradish has.

This guy was supposed to be a reliever. He didn’t throw enough strikes. Didn’t throw too hard out of the rotation. Had a weird delivery that brought his fastball down vertically. Bradish still leans over to his left as he throws now, but not to the extent that he did in college.

For years, the analysis tracked along a certain path: Reliever. And yet Bradish stayed in the rotation, started throwing strikes, and got an uptick in velocity. By the start of 2022, he was the no. 7 prospect in Baltimore’s system, with a future value grade that would’ve landed him in the top four in several organizations, including in Anaheim. By the end of April, he was in the majors.

And he got wrecked. After two months in the big leagues, Bradish was bound for the IL with shoulder inflammation, which is just as well, since his ERA at the time of the injury was 7.38.

“The fastball was all I had at the beginning of last year, and it didn’t really play,” Bradish says. “It didn’t have as much pop as it had in years past.”

Bradish’s fastball is a little weird. Because of his unorthodox delivery, it has very, very little horizontal movement (just 1.3 inches in 2022), and it was getting crushed. When he threw his four-seamer last year, opponents posted a .420 wOBA. (For comparison, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s wOBA this season is .419.) Baseball Savant rated it 596th out of 600 in run value. So Bradish started tinkering with a sinker.

“It was August, September, a couple starts after I came off the IL,” he says. “I had faced the Blue Jays [twice in a row and four times in eight starts]. ‘All right, well, you’re feeling pretty good playing with it. Might as well break it out.’”

In his first start with the new sinker, September 6 against Toronto, Bradish lasted just three innings. But the outing after that, he allowed one run on two hits over seven innings. Two starts after that was the best game of his career: 8.2 scoreless innings, 10 strikeouts, two hits, no walks.

“[The sinker] just feels good in my hand, I’m able to just let it rip,” Bradish says. “It might not look metrically like a sinker, but from my arm slot, I get that downhill action to where it plays as a sinker.”

What makes the sinker so important, Bradish says, is that it gives him something with real arm-side movement: “All my [other] pitches kind of go toward first base.” He has thrown a changeup, but it was his least-used pitch in 2022, and he’s thrown just 14 of them all year so far as the sinker has bedded into his repertoire.

Unfortunately, Bradish’s four-seamer remains something of a liability — not as much of one as it was last year, as it still sets up his sinker and his secondary pitches, all of which have been superb in 2023. But on a per-pitch level, the fastball is what it is, and opponents have tagged it to the tune of a .446 wOBA in 2023. He says that with the addition of a sinker, the four-seamer plays more like a cutter, but it’s still getting hit.

But in contrast to last year, Bradish is getting away with it because he’s throwing the four-seamer less — a quarter of the time rather than almost half in 2022. And when he’s not throwing his fastballs, he is throwing his breaking pitches. He has two of them, and they’re both nasty. One is a slider that averages 88 mph but touches 91, which has to be especially disconcerting when you consider that his fastball averages 94.6. Out of the 315 qualified sliders on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard, his has the fifth-most horizontal movement versus average. Or, if you find all that nerdy jargon confusing, just look at this:

The curveball is what you’d get if you took the slider and flipped it on its ear. A mid-80s offering, it has average horizontal movement but is 46th out of 215 in vertical movement versus average.

Taken in concert, with the weird fastball and two highly contradictory breaking pitches, Bradish has a confounding set of pitches. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it unique — hardly anything in baseball is — but hitters certainly go up there expecting the unexpected.

In 2023, Bradish has an ERA of 3.05 in 18 starts, which is 10th among pitchers with at least 90 innings pitched. He’s outpitching his FIP a little, but even that’s down to 3.52, 17th in the league under that innings threshold. You’d take that from… well, almost anyone, really, let alone a pitcher who was destined to be a reliever, if he reached the majors at all. And there are still rough edges to be sanded off. Bradish says he’s not contemplating adding another pitch; he sees his biggest area for improvement as command and consistency. He’s already made strides there, cutting his walk rate from 9.0% to 6.3% and trimming a dinger per nine innings off his home run rate.

There’s a lot of angst around the Orioles’ inability to develop homegrown starting pitching, almost all of it deserved. And as well as Bradish is pitching now, he’s still a long ways off from turning into Mike Mussina, or that one good Erik Bedard season. But much like the Orioles, he’s made huge strides in the past couple years despite inauspicious origins.