All of baseball is grappling with the same problem — pitcher injuries — and this year more than ever it feels like a more acute issue for the Orioles. Grayson Rodriguez landed on the injured list Wednesday and could soon be the fourth long-term absentee in their rotation. With two top relievers missing as well, the Orioles had to deal eight players to add four arms to their roster at last week’s trade deadline.
The hope is, before long, the pitching depth to support the major league team will come from within. That means getting as many young pitchers through the minors as healthy as possible and developing major league arsenals while doing so. Their solution to both of those directives is the same: a tandem starter system.
At all levels of the Orioles’ farm system below Triple-A, many games will feature a starter and a second, planned pitcher who will pitch bulk innings behind him. Neither is throwing a ton of pitches — around 60 at the lower levels and up to the 80s at Double-A — before preparation for a major league workload occurs at Triple-A.
The organization believes it’s the best solution for workload management and arm health, as well as development, ensuring that pitchers’ arms aren’t so taxed in games that their between-outing work is diminished and allowing for in-season improvement for many of their young pitching prospects.
Lower-level pitching coordinator Forrest Herrmann said, in his eyes, development and health are the same thing. This system puts both at the forefront.
“A player who’s unable to be on the field is obviously unable to develop, so if our pitchers are barely able to recover to make their next appearance, what quality of work is really being done in between outings?” Herrmann said. “And what risk are you running with that individual pitcher [if] he’s just barely able to get out there week in and week out? So progressing our guys to the demands at the major league level is something we take very seriously, and we try to do so systematically.”
Although similar in spirit to the system the Houston Astros instituted a decade ago in an effort to develop pitchers, this works differently on a practical level. Then, each affiliate had eight starters and there was a rolling pattern of tandem days and single-starter days, allowing the pitchers to go deeper every three or four outings. There was also no universal Monday off day in the minors, nor were there limits on organizational minor league rosters to prevent affiliates from stashing depth pitchers.
Given the Astros influence Mike Elias brought to Baltimore, including assistant general manager Sig Mejdal and director of pitching Chris Holt, the correlation is no surprise. The Orioles came to it out of necessity after the lost 2020 minor league season and stuck with it as a way to ramp up workloads and give as many pitchers as possible the opportunity to develop in longer roles.
Herrmann said: “It allows for more players to have that structure in their week, and their routine, where they can be on predictable recovery cycles and they can very strategically allocate reps and allocate training economy to goals throughout the week. More players definitely have access to that within the tandem system than your traditional five-man rotation, or [a] six-man rotation.”
That’s allowed for more developmental gains from the pitchers they’re identifying through the draft and international markets, and thus quicker progress through the farm system. Right-hander Cameron Weston has made 16 appearances at Double-A Bowie this year after four dominant starts at High-A Aberdeen. Seven of those Double-A outings have come out of the bullpen. He’ll have a typical starter’s prep meeting before the games when he is the second pitcher, then will begin warming up pregame around 10 minutes after the first starter, biding his time in game and heating up when he’s preparing to enter.
He’s added an effective bat-missing sweeper since the Orioles drafted him in the eighth round of the 2022 draft, to go with a really good sinker, and feels the tandem structure “helps you develop quicker.”
Weston said: “You’re getting those starts, but you aren’t getting those innings to the point where it would tax you and you have to pull back on some of the midweek stuff. If you’re working on certain things, you have a little bit more room to work on whatever you want, really. The arm just feels more fresh in between and start to start.”
There are ancillary benefits beyond workload management. A handful of pitchers exclusively start, though many others get reps coming out of the bullpen, which can help down the line if that ends up being their major league role. The improvements in stuff are attractive, too. Low-A Delmarva pitching coach Andy Sadoski highlighted a handful of players who, through this program, have experienced velocity jumps, including Michael Forret, Nestor German and Braxton Bragg.
“In a lot of these cases, the ability to manage your workload responsibly affords you, A, more energy in the tank come game time but, B, more gamelike practice reps, where if you’re throwing your midweek bullpen, we’re able to throw it at almost a gamelike intensity and still recover in a way that keeps us fresh and ready to go for our next outing,” Sadoski said.
As pitchers reach Triple-A, their workloads more closely mirror what would be required at the major league level. Pitch counts were limited in April, but Chayce McDermott and Cade Povich were in the 90- to 100-pitch range by May. Povich routinely threw 90 pitches per start in High-A in the Twins’ system before he was traded in 2022, and it wasn’t until he reached Norfolk late last season that he was back there consistently. He appreciated the Orioles’ approach to keeping players healthy and said he didn’t have any issue building back up when the time came.
He and McDermott are the first pitchers to come through this pitching program to the majors and experience that jump in workload then transition it to Baltimore. The goal is for there to be many more.
“As guys continue to go through the upper levels, clearly we want to have a more vast depth of bona fide major league starting-pitcher-quality players in our system,” Holt said.
“Those who do default into bullpen roles eventually, in the meantime, are developing full arsenals to face multiple hitter types with multiple weapons and be able to navigate through more than just being a one-inning reliever, which is kind of popular in terms of strategy these days. But, if you have a guy who was a starter in the minor leagues and knows how to go through a lineup 1 1/2 or two times and has faced both righties and lefties at a somewhat equal clip, and has had to navigate his arsenal versus both sides, it certainly helps.”
