The Orioles rotation was horrible and they’ll all be back next year

Source: www.camdenchat.com --- Monday, October 24, 2016
The Orioles starting pitchers were collectively one of the worst units in Baseball. They’re all under contract for 2017. The bad news about the Orioles starting rotation this year is that it was among the worst in Baseball with a collective 4.72 ERA. Worse news is that every single one of the starting pitchers who contributed to that number could be back next year. Any way that you want to break it out, the numbers are ugly and the prospect for next season looks grim. For instance, of the eight starters who started at least ten games for the team, five of them had an ERA over 5.00. That accounts for 84 starts made this year, a bit more than half of the season started by pitchers who were seldom competitive. Not surprisingly for a team whose starters struggled so much, the Orioles rotation also threw among the fewest innings of all American League staffs. Their 886 innings pitched ranked 12th of 15 AL teams. They would have needed to throw 30-35 more innings to be merely average. Those extra innings were chewed up by pitchers like Odrisamer Despaigne and T.J. McFarland, who were even worse than the starters. Worse still is that of those 5+ ERA pitchers, three of them are on the payroll for a combined $33 million for next season. There won’t be many good starting pitching options in free agency this offseason, and even if there were, the Orioles would likely not be able to afford them due to carrying dead weight. That’s the b ...

from Baseball http://ift.tt/2eKTGcP