The Orioles announced Wednesday that they’ve placed right-hander Grayson Rodriguez on the 15-day injured list due to inflammation in his right shoulder. The move is retroactive to April 30. Rodriguez will be replaced by veteran lefty John Means, who has been reinstated from a stint on the 15-day IL himself. Means has yet to pitch this season while recovering from a left forearm strain.
To this point, it’s unclear when Rodriguez hurt himself or how serious the injury is. He started Monday’s game and went 5 2/3 innings, throwing 101 pitches in the process. Until more information comes from the club, it can only be speculated as to how long he’ll out.
Regardless, it’s always a bit concerning when anything goes on with a pitcher’s throwing arm. Losing Rodriguez for any amount of time is a blow to the O’s since he has been in good form for quite a while now. His big league career got off to a rough start last year, as he had a 7.35 earned run average through 10 starts.
The Orioles optioned him to the minors and recalled him almost two months later, with Rodriguez posting good results since then. He had a 2.58 ERA after that recall last year and he has a 3.71 mark so far this year. Going back to that midseason call-up last year to today, he has a 2.93 ERA over 19 starts. In that time, he has a 24.4% strikeout rate, 7.3% walk rate and 46.7% ground ball rate.
Subtracting that kind of pitcher would hurt any rotation, but the O’s also have Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells on the injured list. Until today, Means was in that group as well. After today’s transactions, the healthy rotation consists of Means, Corbin Burnes, Cole Irvin, Dean Kremer and Albert Suárez.
Burnes is excellent but there are some question marks behind him. Irvin has a good ERA this year but iffy peripherals that suggest he’s not much different from past seasons. Kremer has a 4.19 ERA despite a .209 batting average on balls in play he won’t be able to maintain. Suárez has looked good in his three starts but it’s anyone’s guess if he can keep it going since he’s 34 years old and this is his first stint in the majors since 2017.
As for Means, he’s a big unknown himself. The lefty posted a 3.81 ERA with the O’s until requiring Tommy John surgery in April of 2022. He returned late last year and made four starts but didn’t make the club’s postseason roster due to some elbow soreness. He began this year on the IL and has been rehabbing in recent weeks, but with shaky results. He has thrown 18 2/3 innings for Triple-A Norfolk but with 18 earned runs allowed in that time.
It’s impossible to say what Means can provide for the club this year after hardly pitching at all in the previous two seasons and his poor results during his rehab, though he would be an asset if he could even get part of the way back to his pre-surgery form. Bradish is also nearing activation, which will give Baltimore another arm to bolster the group and could perhaps push Suárez into a long relief role in the bullpen.
Oof. Yet another pitcher on the shelf.
If pitchers only threw 50-60 pitches/game, injuries would drop substantially – especially with the effort and intensity that these guys are throwing at. So many of these pitchers are pitching fatigued once they are beyond 50-60 pitches. Trying to perform at a high level while fatigued increases the risk for injury substantially.
Not to mention, they can see their velocity and sometimes even spin rate in real time, so if they aren’t hitting the numbers they think they should be, they start overcompensating to get where they want to be.
With limits on rosters of how many pitchers can be on a team, and it not being good for the game to not have your traditional starters going deep into games, this will likely never change, but it’s the main issue behind injuries.
I imagine there are stats that back this up but I don’t exactly know where to find them.
Starters ERA based on what inning it is. I would like to see those stats.
It seems like particularly the last few years the starting pitchers give up more runs late in the game than they used to. But I would like to see the stats league wide for this.
Its well established that batting averages increase every time a batter sees a pitcher in a game. The batting average is about 25 points higher the third time through the lineup compared to the first time. I’d be interested to see if there was a way to find out how much of that is familiarity vs fatigue
25 points in batting average isn’t really the statistic I am looking for. Starter ERA based on inning probably would tell the story.
As a Cardinals fan I have seen the team leave the starter in the game too long for year after year. But the problem is the guy who pitches the 5th or 6th inning in relief usually isn’t any good. So you would need to have a really good pen for it to make sense.
It’d be interesting if a team was built of 10-12 pitchers all capable of throwing 50-60 pitches.. so basically you’d have your starter go 3-4 innings, a second guy go 3-4 innings, and then a closer. Obviously things wouldn’t always go that way, so you’d have to adjust a bit, but I imagine pitchers would recover quicker and could throw every 4 days instead of every 5 if they aren’t fully exhausted throwing 90-100 pitches.
There would probably need to be some shuffling between the big league team and minors when things got thin.
I think the Rockies might have tried that a while back, maybe around the early 2010’s. Probably should google it for a bit instead of just going off of vague memories, but it was something called Project 5875 (or whatever the altitude Coors is).
It was setup where a starter would pitch about 80 pitches and have a “piggyback” go in to soak up multiple innings after him. I want to say it was a 4 man/tandem rotation.
Pretty sure it never got anywhere and was deemed a failure. I mean, if there were any substantial success to this plan, I’d bet more teams would’ve tried between then and now.
Right now you have a lot of relievers that only pitch an inning at a time. If you started using them for multiple innings would that lessen their effectiveness?
Shuttling guys back and forth from AAA to the bigs could make some sense but these guys need to be paid appropriately. The Cardinals used to do this thing where they would call a guy up use him for 3 or 4 innings to protect the pen then send him back down the same or next day. That guy only got 1 dsy of big league pay when he deserved more. Fix that and I am OK with shuttling guys back and forth.
I don’t know that I’d take any experiment done with the Rockies and pitching as a true showing of how well something does or doesn’t work.
Not to mention, I’m suggesting 50-60 pitches max for a pitcher. Ask any athlete to do any explosive full body movement at max effort – once most get beyond 15-20 reps (in this case pitches) in one segment, you start overcompensating, increasing injury risk. Now when you couple that with sitting down for 10-15 minutes, getting back up and doing it all over again multiple times, I imagine performance diminishes after the second or third time, which would put a pitcher at 45-60 reps or pitches.
I remember something about that but not the details.
I think a lot of baseball executives are ultra conservative and fear change. It would be nice if someone would try something outside the box. A teal like the White Sox or As what do they have to lose?
ERA jumps from avg of 4.08 to 4.57 first time through vs 3rd time. OPS+ jumps from 91 to 117. So yes by all means in most instances it benefits a team to pull a starter prior to 3rd time through.
Obviously it’s not 100% and it will backfire. It also leaves it quite easy for people to be critical in hindsight in such cases.
The stats are also likely inflated a bit by the backend of rotations opposed to the top of rotation. By and large though it benefits a team to go to bullpen in most cases 3rd time through. However since it’s not a certainty, this is where having an experienced Manager and Pitching Coach come into play. They need to have a feel for their guys and when they re dealing and the leash should be lengthened.
It looks like the Rockies tried this in 2012, but with terrible pitchers. Guys like Jeff Francis, Drew Pomeranz, Alex White, Jeremy Guthrie, etc.. If a team is going to try a strategy like this, they need to have a solid group of pitchers. This would something for a team like the Rays to try with their homegrown under control pitchers.
Exactly. Well said.
Tony LaRussa’s Oakland A’s in the 90’s tried this and it failed miserably.
Tony LaRussa’s Oakland A’s in the late 80’s and early 90’s tried this and it didn’t work.
Well they added an extra roster spot recently so that helps. And frankly I don’t believe you need more than 12 position players on the team at one time.
Frankly, I don’t think you’re qualified to make that call.
I agree that it’s not a good fix entertainment wise, which is why I said it likely won’t happen, but it would work.
Using your approach is like trying to tell a sprinter to not sprint as hard because it increases the likelihood of injury. The game needs to get away from velocity, spin rate and all the other analytical data – especially in real time. However, I think we are just scratching the surface of where the game is going with analytics, I don’t see it going backwards.
Pitching with finesse and hitting your spots is hard work. Throwing with as much velo as you can and blowing away hitters gets you to the bigs faster and gets you paid more. I don’t see it changing until the incentives change.
The strike zone is about 2/3 the size of what it was before umps were analyzed for every pitch. A guy like Maddux would still be good in today’s game, but he wouldn’t be able to get near the calls 3-6 inches off the plate that he did back then. Same with Glavine.
Personally, I’d rather face a Maddux type any day over a Randy Johnson. With Maddux, at least I know he’s going to be near the zone. With Randy, my life could end on any pitch.. let alone try to hit his 98mph fastball or 89mph darting slider.
It’s incredibly difficult to throw 90mph and also be pinpoint accurate. You’re more likely to see pitchers reinvent themselves after injury rather than seeing an influx of philosophy change in the years ahead.
Enjoy your knowledge and insight. Thanks for sharing.
Exactly, players make 50K in AAA and 750K on the IL. Go ahead and blow your elbow out and you get 2 years of making 750K while you recover
You are confusing Maddux with Glavine. Maddux threw strikes and hit corners. Glavine threw pitches 8 inches off the plate that were called strikes for some unknown reason.
It’s not that difficult to throw 90 with pinpoint accuracy. It’s hard to throw 95 with that accuracy. The degree of difficulty throwing accurately jumps exponentially in that range.
Your right about Glavine and when they stopped giving him that pitch he had to start throwing a show me curve. Maddux had that backdoor 2 seamer that was a thing of beauty.
Exactly, the bullpens would add new arms every day.
We just going to add another 5 roster spots to account for the extra RPs teams would need?
If the mound height went back to 15 inches and park dimensions increased in size we would see less injury. If baseballs were not as wound tight pitchers would be less injured. Probably taking off all armor off hitters arms and hands would result in less injury as hitters wouldn’t crowd the plate and take away outside corners as much.
But, 50-60 pitches would result in more roster spots as the league would need 15 pitchers. Although this method would also advocate max effort velocity as 50-60 pitches is nothing to guys used to throwing 90 pitches in high school.
A lot of hype for this secondary stats guy without much to back it up
Where is there “hype” in this posting? It’s literally four sentences detailing the return from one player on the IL and another taking his place on the IL.
Hmm, this jagoff must’ve never watched Grayson pitch.
He’s just a troll, nothing more. Doubt Steve even watches the games.
Why is this a new thing? Why 20 years ago guys threw 250 plus innings?
Because pitchers are throwing harder. In the last 15 years the average velocity went from 91 to 94.
On top of that, guys throw 4-6 different pitches with different types of rotation. Not just typical fastball, curve and change up.
Nolan Ryan threw mid 90’s plus his entire 20 year career and threw well over 300 innings a season and he never got injured.
The majority of pitchers threw nearly 10mph slower on average. You had a few guys that threw as hard as the guys do now, and there’s several pitchers that throw hard now and go a long time without issue. The fact is that when you have 90% of guys throwing this hard and when velocity is the #1 thing kids are told that matters, injuries are going to pile up..
The other big factor is money. Teams are more invested in these players than they were back then, and players are hoping for a big payday at some point, so they probably aren’t going to push themselves, nor will teams want to push their investments to overextend themselves. Back then, there wasn’t near the potential to make the $ a player can these days, so pitchers would pitch through a lot more pain.
In addition to the velo and breaking ball changes, guess how many years most dudes lasted while pitching that much?
Look up a dozen of your favorite sub-HOF-level guys. You’ll be shocked at how many were cooked by 32.
Another big factor: weight training & physique. Weight training was pretty minimal for pitchers back then, it was all about running long distance, which is rarely done by pitchers these days.
Now so many players have much more muscle than players had then, and with more muscle creates more stress on tendons and ligaments.
Back in the day these were all farm boys that also had to work normal, full time jobs in order to play baseball. They weren’t hyper-specialised athletes with hyper-focused training regimines. Back then, there was no such thing as a relief pitchter, and there wasn’t even a pitching rotation. Your starting pitcher was your pitcher and that was it.
Guys threw just as hard back then as they do now. It is just they didn’t have radar guns back in the day so they did their best with a stop watch and the naked eye.
The problem is with these hyper focused training regimes, you also add in the supplements these guys are taking. Several in particular are known to cause joint and connective tissue damage.
Pitchers did sprints to build their leg muscles, not marathons.
I’m telling you start letting pitchers go longer! These 6 inning 90 pitch limits are a big part in this. These older guys use to throw 130 pitches. There arm strength was built up. Also learn how to pitch! Not throw 102.
Old man yells at baseball.
Young man acts stupid.
Tell a sprinter to not run as fast as he can bc it lowers his risk of injury, and let me know how that goes.
The problem is what allows these players to throw that hard. They are full of overly tight and immobile muscles, tight ligaments and tendons, and have analytics to help them maximize their output on the mound. Teams and scouts want velocity.
Hypothetically if you went to a high school game and saw Jamie Moyer vs Randy Johnson:
Moyer throws 83mph, 7 shutout innings, 6 hits, 0 walks, 6 K’s
Johnson throws 95+, 7 shutout innings, 1 hit, 6 walks, 15 K’s..
As a scout, you’re going to say “Man, if Johnson can figure out his control, he’s a Hall of Famer.”
When that same scout looks at Moyer, he’s gonna say “If he can add 5-7mph to his fastball, he could be a solid big league pitcher.”
There’s more to this than throwing hard. Injuries are not increasing at a consistent rate with velocity. Injuries are outpacing velocity in general, and particularly with pitchers that are not velo-reliant.
Injuries aren’t always correlated directly in time with velocity though either.
A pitcher like Wade Miley for example, said he’s been pitching through pain since 2021, and he’s just now getting surgery. I’m sure there’s numerous pitchers pitching through an injury trying to reach their free agency or next big arbitration payout. Some can pitch years with pain, some can’t pitch a single game. Velocity and spin rate have gone way up, and the elbow isn’t built to stand up to that over time.
I understand what you’re saying, but velo and spin rate increases have not remained consistent with injuries either, not to mention it’s only been measure for a relatively short duration. The fact that Miley was pitching through pain is an unknown variable with relation to his injury. Last season over 500 IL stints were recorded for pitcher arm injuries, IIRC. This season is on pace to outnumber that.
But it stands to reason that even pitchers with average (or below average) spin rates/velo are spiking in injuries. There’s more to this than velo or spin rate, imo.
This move is for one of two things: real inflammation or a creative way to get rest. Either way, considering he’s 6 starts into 2024, this isn’t a good sign.
The thing about an shoulder inflammation is that it can be as simple as taking 2 weeks off to clear it up or it could be a career ending rotator cuff issue. It’s impossible for fans to know unless the front office tells us.
Put too much pressure on himself pitching in that useless game against the Yankees and over did it.
Buh Bye!
What a stupid comment
What makes it a “useless” game? I would think it’s a fairly pertinent game against a division rival who you will likely be battling all season for the top spot. I swear you insert words like “useless” just to provoke people and garner a response. Yes, it worked in my regard but I am only doing it to show others how you needlessly bait people, which makes you nothing but Old York the Troll. But everyone who follows this site knows that by now.
@Ignorant Son-of-a-b
He threw 5.2 innings, threw 101 pitches in a game in April. He came out of the gate throwing gas and by the 5th inning that gas was replaced with off-speed. He was obviously pitching though some discomfort from overdoing it against a so-called rival in April. Now, they probably won’t have him for a bit as he sits on the IL. What a great job of chucking the ball in a useless game. Now you’ve played yourself and your team.
Now, as for your claim about me being a troll, I’d suggest that someone who is making unsubstantiated claims, as you’ve made above, is probably a troll. Oh, not only did Grayson play himself but you did too.
Pressure to pitch against the Yankees? Grayson owns the Yankees. The Yankees haven’t scored on Grayson yet in his career
@Os1995
Oh, no! Two games. He struggled in that 2nd game and it showed. Now he’s on he IL so it’s hard for him to face them.
FIP xFIP
2.94 4.24
3.69 5.93
Clown troll
@SewaldSwansonSwoon
In other words, you’re telling me you don’t like data. Okay…
You have a bad habit of making assumptions. A game against a division rival matters as much now as in Sept. Only a troll would mock someone for giving his efforts to a game against the team they’re competing against for First Place in the div.
And speaking of data, cherry picker, do runs allowed. Oh, zero. Woof!
I really hate this for my Os. They have some good pitching but can’t keep it healthy. Bradish, Means, Wells, Bautista, and now Grod. Hope Bradish is better
Hmmm, right after Lefty os fan talked smack about the Trout injury. Karma?
I’ll be curious to see how Bradish looks. Velocity was down during his rehab assignment. The rest and PRP approach has rarely worked.
The velo wasnt that far down. He averaged 95.0 on the sinker last year and was 94.1-94.2 in the rehab starts. Last April his 3 starts averaged 94.3, 94.5, and 93.7 respectively. It may be something where his velo returns as the weather gets warmer.
Maybe he just hadn’t built up his arm strength yet but I agree. Elbow issues like that never seem to work out with just rest and rehab. I’m thinking Cole will have the same outcome.
Well before the season started, I said the orioles will lose one of their bigger pitchers due to injury (Grayson or Bradish)so far it’s been both. I figured it would just be Grayson because it’s his 2nd year and that’s what always happens to young pitchers (2nd year Tommy John) same crap different smell year after year.
Bradish is coming back though.
I thought Steve A was spot on with his assessment of each SP in this article.
In regards to the Orioles SP injury bug, what a difference a year makes. Last year, outside of the Wells arm fatigue issue, a healthy staff. This year, oof. Interested to see if they can get to 101, again.
I don’t know how you could think that. Suarez was good in his last start? No. Kremer’s ERA is a fluke? No. Means’ AAA results matter? Nope.
I know a fairly recent Cy Young winner who pitched 7 and a third scoreless in Mexico last sunday who does not have inflammation in his throwing shoulder that they could sign right now for the league minimum…
Wipe your lips
Begone Cult of Bauer!
O’s need to sign top SPs wherever available. I’m not sure Bauer is the answer, but sitting pat is definitely NOT. Gotta grab it while it is close.
The mysterious sudden injury from a few days ago when we need to make a roster spot for another pitcher coming off the injury rehab assignment. Mmhmm.
Ra, you can stop replying, I got you blocked. Save yourself some time and just quit while you’re way behind.
It’s a way to alleviate his innings with means and bradish available… are you people simple??
I agree. To me this seems like a “have your cake & eat it too” scenario. Grayson’s control wobbled in his last two starts, and they did move him back in the rotation about two weeks ago, so he probably has some minor irritation. But this gets Means back into the mix without having to decide between Suarez and Irvin, and in turn sacrifice a reliever from the pen since they have… no one with options left out there. Rather than DFA a guy to activate Means, just shelf the young guy who’s a little sore and delay the decision for a few days until Bradish activates.
I remember when Tanaka had the opposite that you get him in the 1st time around but he gets better as he pitches deeper into the game. And he didn’t do that with 96-100 on his fastball, he pitched with a small tear and adjusted throwing around 91-95 while playing with deceptions. Which you don’t see many pitchers doing that nowadays