Short an ace? In a loaded AL East? Here’s why the Orioles think they can win anyway
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Jorge Castillo
SARASOTA, Fla. — The state of the 2025 Baltimore Orioles, one of enviable surplus in position-player talent and a potential deficit in the pitching department, was on display in their clubhouse Tuesday afternoon.
First, 41-year-old Charlie Morton, the second-oldest player in the majors, was scratched from his Grapefruit League start against the Toronto Blue Jays that evening without an immediate reason, briefly raising concerns that the Orioles’ rotation had experienced another setback. Within minutes, corner infielder Coby Mayo, one of the top prospects in baseball, openly expressed his displeasure to reporters about Baltimore’s decision to option him to minor league camp.
But Morton was not injured — the Orioles just chose to have him pitch in a simulated setting on a back field instead of facing a division rival. And the Orioles are not down on Mayo, who has clubbed 34 home runs with a .919 OPS in Triple-A over the past two seasons — they simply decided they did not have room for him on the big league roster.
“That’s what happens when you have good teams,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said.
The Orioles expect to be good for a reason. The question is, how good?
This year’s club features a lineup, fueled by a ballyhooed young core, that should mash even after Anthony Santander and his 44 home runs left to join the Blue Jays during the offseason. The starting rotation, however, projects as the worst in a loaded American League East — the only division in baseball that PECOTA projects will have all five teams win at least 80 games.
“The other four teams are really, really good teams,” Hyde said. “It’s going to be a dogfight every night. You’re going to be facing somebody that’s really good on a nightly basis in the division.”
The Orioles have been good enough to navigate the treacherous AL East and reach the postseason in each of the past two years. Whether they can make another playoff appearance — and finally win a game in October — will come down to their pitching, particularly the starting rotation.
The Orioles do not have a proven ace. They had one last season in Corbin Burnes, a former Cy Young Award winner whom they acquired entering his final season before free agency. Burnes had an All-Star season in Baltimore, posting a 2.92 ERA across 32 starts. Then he left. Seeking a home out West, the right-hander signed a six-year, $210 million contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks at the end of December.
The Orioles have replaced him with two veteran free agents on the wrong side of the aging curve — Morton and 35-year-old Tomoyuki Sugano — on one-year deals for a combined $28 million. To fill the hole left by Santander in the outfield, they signed veteran Tyler O’Neill to a three-year, $49.5 million deal. In the process, Baltimore, in David Rubenstein’s first offseason as principal owner, raised its luxury tax payroll from $89.4 million last season to $126.8 million, which ranks 24th in baseball, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts.
“I think it’s a tough thing in sports, particularly for baseball, particularly for teams that aren’t the handful of larger market teams that can run the $300 million payrolls, that you’re going to have athletes leave,” Orioles general manager Mike Elias said. “Nobody wants it any time, but a big part of our profession is scripting out what’s the healthiest way to run the organization long term and from top to bottom and sometimes that involves not being the winner on a free agent.”
The rotation took another step back earlier this month when Grayson Rodriguez, the Orioles’ projected No. 1 starter, was shut down with elbow inflammation. He started throwing again Tuesday, but will begin the season on the injured list, leaving Zach Eflin to start on Opening Day in Toronto. Dean Kremer, Cade Povich and Albert Suárez complete Baltimore’s list of options for the rotation.
Internal reinforcements could eventually bolster the group. Right-hander Kyle Bradish, who finished fourth in AL Cy Young voting in 2023, is on track to join the rotation in the second half of the season after undergoing Tommy John surgery in June. Left-hander Trevor Rogers, an All-Star in 2021 who struggled mightily upon being traded to Baltimore last summer, could be available early in the season after dislocating his right kneecap in January.
The final spot in the rotation is a competition between Povich, a 24-year-old left-hander who recorded a 5.54 ERA in 16 starts last season, and Suárez, a 35-year-old journeyman who emerged last season to post a 3.70 ERA across 133⅔ innings. Povich was given Morton’s start Tuesday and tossed five hitless innings, better positioning himself for the job. Morton, meanwhile, threw to Orioles hitters on a back field as he prepares for his 17th season.
The right-hander launched his career as a mediocre young pitcher, became a first-time All-Star at 34 years old and is now an age-defying wonder who has outlasted most of his peers. Along the way, he’s been around successful young rosters. He was on the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ last playoff teams in the mid-2010s. He won a World Series with the Houston Astros in 2017, advanced to another one with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2020 and won his second title with the Atlanta Braves in 2021.
He said these Orioles, a few of whom are nearly half his age, remind him of the Astros teams he played on.
“I think certainly you want to prove yourself on an individual level to other people, to yourself,” Morton said. “But once you start to taste winning and once you start to kind of see that you can be, as a group, better than you, then you kind of build a momentum. And that momentum becomes something that really shapes your identity. And then you start to, as a group, believe in being able to do things that are greater than what you thought you could do maybe at the beginning. I think in Houston we had that.”
The Orioles’ position-player group, while bursting with talent, is not foolproof. Superstar shortstop Gunnar Henderson, who finished fourth in AL MVP voting in his age-23 season in 2024, could miss the start of the season with an intercostal injury. Two-time All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman, the organization’s other cornerstone, is seeking to rebound from a second-half collapse in production. Second baseman Jackson Holliday, the top prospect in baseball a year ago, will look to establish himself after slashing .189/.255/.311 in 60 games as a 20-year-old rookie.
“We have guys that still haven’t reached their upside for me,” Hyde said.
If that happens — if Henderson somehow takes another step, if Rutschman rediscovers his form, if Holliday, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser and Heston Kjerstad, all 26 and under, play to their potential — then the Orioles will be very good. To be great, they’ll need their rotation to exceed expectations.
“We made the playoffs,” first baseman Ryan Mountcastle said of last year’s club, which was swept in the wild-card round by the Kansas City Royals. “That’s always huge. You just got to get there first. It wasn’t the end result we wanted, but I think we’ve learned from it, we’ve grown from it. Hopefully we bring it into this coming year, hopefully make the playoffs again and make a better run.”
ARLINGTON, Texas — Boston Red Sox designated hitter Rafael Devers became the first major leaguer to strike out 12 times in a season’s first four games.
Devers went 0-for-4 with two more strikeouts Sunday in Boston’s 3-2 loss to the Texas Rangers.
Devers’ latest mark for futility came a day after he became the first big leaguer to be fanned 10 times in the first three games of a season.
He’s 0-for-16, though he did draw a two-out walk in the ninth Sunday to keep the inning alive and put the potential tying run in scoring position.
The 12 strikeouts broke the previous record of 11 in the first four games, which had been done four times previously since 1901, according to SportRadar.
Brent Rooker of the Athletics struck out 11 times to open last season. The others were Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2020, Minnesota’s Byron Buxton in 2017 and Houston’s Brett Wallace in 2013.
Devers is now solely the Red Sox DH after their offseason acquisition of third baseman Alex Bregman.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The two teams suing NASCAR over antitrust allegations said Wednesday in a filing that a countersuit against 23XI Racing, Front Row Motorsports and Michael Jordan’s manager is “an act of desperation” and asked that it be dismissed.
NASCAR’s countersuit contends that Jordan business manager Curtis Polk “willfully” violated antitrust laws by orchestrating anticompetitive collective conduct in connection with the most recent charter agreements.
23XI and Front Row were the only two organizations out of 15 that refused to sign the new agreements, which were presented to the teams last September in a take-it-or-leave-it offer 48 hours before the start of NASCAR’s playoffs.
The charters were fought for by the teams ahead of the 2016 season and twice have been extended. The latest extension is for seven years to match the current media rights deal and guarantee 36 of the 40 spots in each week’s field to the teams that hold the charters, as well as other financial incentives. 23XI — co-owned by Jordan — and Front Row refused to sign and sued, alleging NASCAR and the France family that owns the stock car series are a monopoly.
Wednesday’s filing claims that NASCAR’s counterclaim is “retaliatory” and “does not allege the facts necessary to state a claim.”
“NASCAR is using the counterclaim to engage in litigation gamesmanship, with the transparent objective of intimidating the other racing teams by threatening them with severe consequences if they support Plaintiffs’ challenge to the unlawful NASCAR monopoly,” the response says.
23XI and Front Row have requested NASCAR’s counterclaim be dismissed because it “fails at the threshold because it does not allege facts plausibly showing a contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade.
“The counterclaim allegations instead show each racing team individually determining whether or not to agree to NASCAR’s demands through individual negotiations — the opposite of a conspiracy.”
The filing also defends Polk, who was specifically targeted in NASCAR’s counterclaim as the mastermind of the contentious two-year battle between the teams and the stock car series. NASCAR claimed in its countersuit that Polk threatened a team boycott of Daytona 500 qualifying races, but the teams argued Wednesday “there is no allegation that such a threatened boycott of qualifying races ever took place.”
“None of NASCAR’s factual claims fit into the very narrow categories of blatantly anti-competitive agreements that courts summarily condemn as per se unlawful,” the teams said.
Jordan, through a spokesperson, sent word to The Associated Press that Polk speaks for him and the NBA icon views any attack on Polk as “personal.”
NASCAR’s attorney has warned that a consequence of the 23XI and Front Row lawsuit could lead to the abolishment of the charter system outright — NASCAR argues it would be a consequence and not what NASCAR actually wants to do — and that 23XI first made this personal by naming NASCAR chairman Jim France in the original antitrust lawsuit.
The teams struck back at the threat to eliminate the charter system in Wednesday’s filing. It alleges it is an empty threat meant to scare the 13 organizations that did sign the charter agreements.
The claim also says Front Row should be dismissed from NASCAR’s countersuit because “NASCAR does not allege any specific conduct by Front Row or its owners or employees to support a claim that it participated in the alleged conspiracy.”
“The other allegations in the counterclaim against Front Row are all entirely conclusory or improper group pleading that seeks to lump in Front Row with 23XI Racing, Mr. Polk, and “others,” while never identifying what — if anything — Front Row Motorsports itself has done to purportedly participate in the alleged conspiracy.”
There is no deadline for a judge’s decision.
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