If not for Su\u00e1rez\u2019s unexpected emergence, the Orioles rotation picture could have been a grim one.<\/p>\n
One of the common trends of spring training from year to year is the list of non-roster invites who are players probably no Orioles fan has ever thought of before and most likely will never think of again once the season begins. The 2024 spring training roster had fewer invited players than usual but still slipped in a fair number of the anonymous: Daniel Ba\u00f1uelos, Daniel Johnson, Ronald Guzm\u00e1n, Albert Su\u00e1rez, Andrew Su\u00e1rez, Nathan Webb.<\/p>\n
As is typical, I had no expectation that any of these players would matter to the 2024 team. Albert Su\u00e1rez, a 34-year-old with previous major league experience who had just spent the last several years pitching in Japan and South Korea, became the latest non-roster invite to prove me wrong by going on to be a significant contributor to the team.<\/p>\n
The door was cracked open for someone unexpected to emerge from the very first day of spring training, when Mike Elias revealed the previously-unannounced roll of injuries. That blew everyone\u2019s dreams of an Opening Day rotation including either Kyle Bradish or John Means right out of the sky. Yet even this didn\u2019t get Su\u00e1rez onto the roster on March 28. It was only when Tyler Wells went down for the season after making just three starts that Su\u00e1rez entered the picture.<\/p>\n
With all of Bradish, Means, and Wells on the shelf, it was really only out of desperation that the Orioles turned to Su\u00e1rez. April was far too early to consider a prospect like Cade Povich or Chayce McDermott, or to make the kind of trades that the team ultimately made in July.<\/p>\n
Having Su\u00e1rez in the rotation could have easily looked a lot like the ghosts of bad Orioles rotations past, like Matt Harvey, Spenser Watkins, or Asher Wojciechowski. He came along with a ready-made feel-good story: Out of the league since 2017, his brother Robert having recently made the jump from Japanese baseball to an MLB role with the Padres. In Birdland, we are well-aware that feel-good stories offer no guarantee of feel-good performance.<\/p>\n
Su\u00e1rez was summoned to the Orioles rotation for the first time on April 17. After 5.2 scoreless innings against the Twins, he made another start that also ended with 5.2 scoreless against the Angels. A third start where he gave up four runs in four innings against Oakland, combined with the short-lived returns of Bradish and Means, kicked Su\u00e1rez into the bullpen.<\/p>\n
The exile was only temporary. Su\u00e1rez kept himself on the radar by rattling off ten innings across seven outings where he gave up just one earned run. This stretch of games saw him limit opposing batters to a .401 OPS, with only four hits allowed overall. This went well enough to where you could start to wonder if the Orioles had actually found a useful reliever to throw into the mix.<\/p>\n
We never got to find out because Means was quickly back on the shelf and Su\u00e1rez was right back into the rotation. Even in July, when the Orioles acquired two starting pitchers, Su\u00e1rez only ended up back in the bullpen for exactly one game, with Grayson Rodriguez getting hurt to open up a rotation spot for him yet again. In addition to the injuries knocking out players, Su\u00e1rez outlasted Cole Irvin, Cade Povich, and Trevor Rogers for performance reasons.<\/p>\n
Through all of this back and forth, Su\u00e1rez kept on rolling along at the level of a perfectly cromulent back-of-the-rotation starting pitcher. He was never quite good enough for long to make you (or at least me) think that he had completely escaped the possibility of a sudden collapse, with clunkers against poor-hitting teams like the Marlins and White Sox.<\/p>\n
Still, most of the time Su\u00e1rez was good enough, and that shows in the team\u2019s record in his starts: 13-11. This is dependent on run support and the bullpen not blowing it, so there\u2019s some luck involved. There was also a lot of Su\u00e1rez pitching decently – perfectly acceptably for the #4 or #5 guy in the rotation.<\/p>\n
All in all, Su\u00e1rez finished with a 3.70 ERA for the season. That\u2019s almost exactly a league-average pitcher; in the park\/league-adjusted ERA+ stat, where 100 is average, Su\u00e1rez finished with a 101. Take out his relief outings and he had a 3.76 ERA in his 24 starts.<\/p>\n
In terms of WAR value, Su\u00e1rez clocked in at 2.1 in bWAR and 1.4 in fWAR. The only Orioles pitcher with a higher bWAR as an Oriole was Corbin Burnes at 3.2. (Zach Eflin had 2.6 bWAR, but only 1.6 of that was with the O\u2019s.) The FIP-based fWAR docked Su\u00e1rez some value because Su\u00e1rez had one of the weaker strikeout rates for a starting pitcher, so his FIP was about a half of a run above his ERA.<\/p>\n
The Orioles needed Su\u00e1rez more than any of us could have imagined in February and he answered the call all year. The team had a tough enough time getting through the second half of the season as it was. Take out Su\u00e1rez and put in some 6+ ERA jabroni and the 2024 Orioles would have ended up a lot closer to the disaster that at times it seemed like they were going to reach.<\/p>\n
Su\u00e1rez is going to be an important piece to start the 2025 season too. Though he\u2019s now 35, the long hiatus for his MLB career while he pitched in Asia means he\u2019s still going to be a pre-arbitration player next season, so the cost to retain him is almost non-existent.<\/p>\n
Can Su\u00e1rez do something like this again? We\u2019re probably going to find out. Maybe he can be what Miguel Gonz\u00e1lez was to the 2012-14 Orioles. As things stand right now, Su\u00e1rez is probably the #3 starter on paper, behind Eflin and Rodriguez and ahead of Kremer and Povich. You can swap Kremer and Su\u00e1rez if you want. Either way, it doesn\u2019t seem like Su\u00e1rez would be the first guy bumped out by an impact signing or trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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