A good start for new regime: Improve organization-wide pitching

As the Orioles look to build a consistent winner at the big league level from pretty much the ground up, developing solid pitchers will be a key to that.

Maybe the key to that.

With Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal and minor league pitching coordinator Chris Holt all coming from Houston, you have to like the Orioles' chances here.

In the 2018 season, Houston's four full-season minor league affiliates all led their respective leagues in strikeouts and three of the four also rated first in their league in team ERA. Houston's Triple-A team was sixth in team ERA.

At the major league level, Houston ranked third in the American League in rotation ERA in 2017 at 4.03 and first last season at 3.16. Not to mention the fact that individual pitchers would get better on their watch.

At the same time, the O's rotation produced an ERA of 5.70 in 2017, which ranked as the worst in team history. It was 5.48 in 2018, which again ranked last in the AL.

Right-hander Charlie Morton went 10-10 with a 4.74 ERA in 2015 and 2016 with the Pirates and Phillies. Then Houston signed him as a free agent. Over the 2017 and 2018 seasons with the Astros, he went 29-10 with an ERA of 3.36 and WHIP of 1.176. A pitcher who has averaged 7.4 strikeouts per nine innings in his major league career, Morton averaged 10.0 per nine innings with Houston in 2017 and 10.8 last year. And that 7.4 average is after his two seasons with Houston.

This all led to Morton recently signing a two-year deal worth $30 million with Tampa Bay with a vesting option for 2021. Houston did not keep him, maybe concerned with an injury past that included Tommy John surgery in 2012 and two hip surgeries. But on their watch, he thrived and made himself a lot of money.

Elias recently talked about the strong pitching development program he was part of putting in place in Houston and how he wants to do the same here.

"We're very much hoping to replicate even a semblance of that success here," Elias said. "And the fact we have Sig here and we have Chris Holt here now, who was our assistant pitching coordinator in Houston, makes me feel really good about our chances of doing so. But there is a little bit of a secret sauce behind that, and I'm not going to explain it fully here. But we had a great program there. We took a lot of time developing it, and we really want to get that in place here as well."

Houston's track record of production on the farm and also its ability to get the best out of a vet like Morton has to encourage Orioles fans for what they might see over the next few years.

What will this mean for prospects like DL Hall, Grayson Rodriguez, Zac Lowther, Dillon Tate, Keegan Akin and so many more? What will it mean for 26-year-old Dylan Bundy, still a young pitcher with three years of team control remaining? A pitcher that, due to a combination of injuries and having signed a major league contract out of the draft, lost a lot of development innings on the farm earlier in his career.

They were getting pitching results in Houston and maybe some of the "secret sauce" that was involved will be brewing in Baltimore over the next few seasons.