Sure the Orioles, like most teams that don’t have one, could use an ace pitcher. They still hope to add one before the start of the 2025 season. 

But their current rotation has the makings of being a good one.

Here is how it looks today:

Zach Eflin: He is the probable Opening Day starter. After the trade to the Orioles, over nine starts, he went 5-2 with a 2.60 ERA. Only nine pitchers, including the Orioles' Corbin Burnes, that qualified, posted season-long ERAs under 3.00. To do it even for nine starts was impressive.

Eflin finished sixth for the 2023 American League Cy Young Award and has been among the best pitchers in the American League. Over the last two years, while Burnes posted a 3.15 ERA and 1.083 WHIP, Eflin was at 3.54 and 1.085.

Today, it’s another edition, our pre-Holiday edition, of several questions for O’s fans. Per usual, answer one question or all of them. Respond to other readers' answers with your takes on their takes. 

On to the questions:

1) Where does right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano slot into the O’s rotation? And after going 15-3 with a 1.67 ERA in Japan, how well will he do for the 2025 Orioles?

2) Which player will bat leadoff the most next season?

3) Which player will lead the 2025 O’s in home runs and hit how many?

When the Orioles begin the 2025 season, there is a pretty good chance right-hander Dean Kremer will be in their rotation. As he has been for the last few seasons.

Kremer posted an ERA of 3.23, a career best, in 21 starts in 2022. But he had a 4.12 ERA the next season, and last season it was 4.10.

That ERA was essentially league average: an ERA+ of 99 in 2023 and his ERA+ was 92 last year. His career mark is 4.28, so the O’s appreciate Kremer’s efforts, of course, but must wonder if he can find a higher gear.

Kremer, who turns 29 on Jan. 7, has just over three years of service time and is arbitration-eligible for the first time. He could get around $3.5 million via arbitration, per MLBTradeRumors.com. He cannot be a free agent until after the 2027 season.

In 2023, Kremer made 32 starts and the O’s had an outstanding 24-8 record in those games. They went 10-14 in his 24 starts this past season.

Mike Snyder just completed his 16^th season with the Orioles. He was inherited by Mike Elias when he joined the Orioles but has proven to be a key lieutenant to the O’s executive vice president and general manager.

Snyder completed his first year in the role of senior director of professional scouting after being promoted in October of 2023. In this role, he oversees the club’s pro scouting and player analysis across the majors, minors, and Asian professional leagues, as well as assisting with contract negotiations, 40-man roster construction, player transactions, and departmental hiring.

He has a hand in evaluating talent ranging from a minor league player who may have little chance to make the majors to some of the best players in all of MLB.

He has plenty of resources at his disposal no doubt and reams of stats, data and video to check as well as his in-person scouting looks.

But does character matter too? What role does that play when the O’s look to acquire a player?

Today in this space a few more comments from 2024 Double-A Bowie manager Roberto Mercado on a few of his players with the Baysox this year.

I interviewed Mercado after the Arizona Fall League season when he led Surprise to the AFL title game. During that interview we talked about his Fall League experience but also about several of his 2024 Baysox players.

One pitcher that impressed him was right-hander Cameron Weston, the club’s round eight pick in 2022 out of the University of Michigan.

He had solid stats pitching in four games at the start of last season for High-A Aberdeen before he moved to Bowie and pitched in 23 more games with 14 starts.

Despite his good 2024 and career numbers, Weston is not ranked in the current MLBPipeline.com O’s top 30 prospects list.

For the Orioles in recent years, seeing a highly-ranked prospect come up and produce right away has been a challenge. Frankly, it’s a challenge for a lot of players and teams.

Any move up the minor league ladder can be a challenge for a young player but the move to the majors is the hardest. Hard to get there, sometimes harder to stay there.

The O’s can go back to Cal Ripken Jr. to see his rough start in the majors. More recently, then No. 1 ranked prospect Adley Rutschman came up in May of 2022. After his first 20 big league games, he was batting .176 with no homers or RBIs. Colton Cowser hit .115 in 2023, and Grayson Rodriguez had an ERA of 7.35 his first 10 MLB starts. Now he’s a top of the rotation type pitcher.

In 2024, elite prospects like Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo had some big-time MLB struggles.

During the Winter Meetings, O’s director of player development Anthony Villa was asked about how the organization can try to help their top prospects get off to better starts when they arrive in the big leagues?

With 13 international players ranked among the O’s top 30 prospects by MLBPipeline.com, the club’s international program keeps humming along.

It’s big for the Orioles to have both quantity and quality coming from the international prospects. Not only are players like Samuel Basallo getting close now to the majors, but the high number of ranked international prospects will help the O’s mainly a highly-ranked and fertile farm system.

Basallo remains the shining star, having played his age 19 season in 2024. He ends the year ranked as the No. 13 top 100 prospect by both Baseball America and MLBPipeline.

Over 127 games between Double-A Bowie (now Chesapeake) and Triple-A Norfolk, Basallo who turned 20 on Aug. 13, hit .278/.341/.449/.790 with 25 doubles, 19 homers and 65 RBIs.

Basallo produced an .820 OPS with Bowie with 16 homers, 55 RBIs. He hit just .222 with the Tides but batted .297 with an .810 OPS his last 11 games, after going 7-for-44 his first 10 games.

During my recent conversation with Matt Blood, the O’s vice president, player development and domestic scouting, we spent much of the time discussing what happened on the O’s farm in 2024.

He was honest to say the club was, to use his words “not celebrating” the farm offense from last season.

Sure, a lot went right and players like Samuel Basallo and Coby Mayo and others had plenty of special days and nights on the farm.

But overall, Triple-A Norfolk’s team OPS of .752 rated 13^th of 20 teams in the International League. Double-A Bowie (now Chesapeake) had a team OPS of .667 (ninth of 12 in the Eastern League). High-A Aberdeen was at .684 to finish seventh of 12 in the South Atlantic League. Low-A Delmarva, at .641, ranked 11^th of 12 in the Carolina League.

Like the big league club making some changes and adjustments on offense, the farm system may do some of the same moving forward.

When the Orioles recently announced their coaching staff for the 2025 season, one of the new hires was Robinson Chirinos, who will be the team’s bench coach.

That is quite the entry into the coaching ranks for Chirinos, 40, whose last season playing in the majors was in 2022 for the Orioles.

He played in 67 games for that O’s team, and in 220 plate appearances he hit .179/.265/.287/.552. Those numbers don’t come close to telling the real story of his year. He was a major presence in the O’s clubhouse, cited often by manager Brandon Hyde as a clubhouse difference-maker for an O’s club that went from 52 wins in 2021 to 83 that season.

He helped teach the Orioles how to win.

That was the team’s first winning season since 2016, and the 31-win gain was the O’s largest in a single season since 1989, when they made a 33-game improvement from their 54–107 record in 1988.

During my interview in this space recently with Orioles Double-A Bowie (now Chesapeake) manager Roberto Mercado, he spent some time talking about his work in the Arizona Fall League and the O’s players he managed there.

But he also spent some time talking about his 2024 season with Double-A Bowie and some of the notable players he managed there this year. We’ll feature this in two parts and check in on a few players today and more in a few days.

Right-handed pitcher Alex Pham, age 25, was not added to the O’s 40-man roster and was available to any team in the recent Rule 5 draft.

Pham, a 19^th-round draft pick from the University of San Francisco, had a solid year for Bowie and he spent all of the 2024 season with the Baysox, making 27 starts.

Pham, who pitched to an ERA of 2.57 in 2023 between High-A Aberdeen and Bowie, went 7-4 with a 4.24 ERA for the Baysox this season. Over 119 innings he allowed 97 hits, had a 1.24 WHIP with a .221 average against and .669 OPS against. He walked 3.78 per nine and fanned 10.44.

The Orioles, as they did during the 2024 season, will have three hitting coaches working with their position players again in the 2025 year.

This time around, Cody Asche returns to the staff as primary hitting coach. The assistant hitting coaches are Sherman Johnson and Tommy Joseph. Johnson will also serve as upper level hitting coordinator.

Johnson, 34, spent last season as the O’s minor league upper-level hitting coordinator. He was the hitting coach at Triple-A Norfolk in 2023, his first professional coaching position after a nine-year playing career.

Joseph, 33, completed his first season as an MLB coach in 2024 as the assistant hitting coach for the Seattle Mariners. He joined the Mariners after three seasons as a minor league hitting coach for the San Francisco Giants with High-A Eugene in 2023 and with the New York Mets for Double-A Binghamton in 2022 and Single-A St. Lucie in 2021. Joseph appeared in 249 MLB games with the Phillies from 2016-17.

Asche, 34, spent the last two years as the O's offensive strategy coach. He served as the organization’s upper-level hitting coordinator in 2022. He was also a guest on a recent addition of the “Hot Stove” radio show on WBAL Radio.

The Orioles are not guaranteeing that Jackson Holliday will be their starting second baseman when the 2025 season starts, but it’s pretty clear they expect exactly that result.

At age 20 in 60 games last season, he hit .189/.255/.311/.565 for an OPS+ of just 66.

His struggles led some fans to question how he became the No. 1 ranked player in the minors and to question his potential? I can remind you how – he earned it.

I asked manager Brandon Hyde this week if Holliday is his guy at second base?

“Think we’re going to give him every opportunity,” the skipper said. “Loved the way he finished the season last year (going 4-for-5 the last weekend). I like the swing adjustments that he’s made. I just talked to him yesterday, he feels great. And you know, he’s a big part of the future for us. We’re going to give him every opportunity this spring.”

While the Orioles continue to work on their offseason and look to add new players to their roster, getting one already on that roster back to previous form is also on the agenda this winter.

Manager Brandon Hyde, in a phone interview Tuesday, said the club has reached out to catcher Adley Rutschman and the work to get his bat going again has begun.

Rutschman finished 12^th in the AL MVP vote in 2022 and ninth in 2023. But in 2024, his OPS dropped from .809 the previous year to .709.

Last season, on June 27, Rutschman was hitting .300 with an .830 OPS. But in his last 71 games, he batted just .189 with four homers and an OPS of .559.

“We’ve been in regular contact with Adley,” Hyde said from the Winter Meetings in Dallas. “We've put some plans in place and collaborated on some things that we feel like, that he feels like, that he wanted to kind of get back to. That kind of went away the second half. We know what kind of player he is and is going to be. We are doing a lot of things with him to get him back offensively and defensively to be the player that he is.

Under the Mike Elias regime, Matt Blood has played a prominent role for the Orioles. He was hired first as director of player development in September of 2019. On his watch, the O’s farm system became the first to be ranked No. 1 in five straight rankings by MLBPipeline.com. 

Blood was promoted to his current role, vice president, player development and domestic scouting in October of 2023.

He was involved in the recent hiring of Triple-A Norfolk manager Tim Federowicz, someone he knows since both were students and involved with the baseball team at the University of North Carolina.

When Buck Britton was hired to move to the O’s big league coaching staff, the club interviewed several candidates for their Triple-A opening before the recent hiring of Federowicz.

Federowicz had a 13-year pro career and played parts of eight season in the majors as a catcher with six teams. He retired in December of 2021.

The Orioles' minor leagues have come a long way under the Mike Elias regime to become the No. 1 ranked organization in the majors. The O's no longer claim the top spot, but they do remain as one of baseball's top farms.

Today, they got another, different honor.

The Orioles organization was named the recipient of the inaugural MiLB Sportsmanship Award. This award is presented to the Major League Baseball organization whose Minor League personnel best exemplify MiLB’s commitment to fostering a culture of sportsmanship and professionalism on the field.

The four organizations that were finalists for the 2024 season were Arizona, Baltimore, Miami and Milwaukee. 

Per a Minor League Baseball press release, "Baltimore’s four affiliates – Norfolk, Bowie (now Chesapeake), Aberdeen and Delmarva – set the standard for exemplary sportsmanship while maintaining a competitive environment for player development without undue interruptions from on-field conflicts. Remarkably, no player, manager, or coach in the Orioles system missed a game due to a suspension for on-field conduct in 2024."

At his offseason home in Florida last Thursday night, while it was very cold in Baltimore, O’s manager Brandon Hyde joined us from a much warmer climate. When Brett Hollander and I hosted the season debut edition of the "Hot Stove" radio show on WBAL Radio, Hyde was a guest.

Not to rub it in, but when asked how the weather was in his neighborhood at that time, he told us he was in shorts and getting ready to cookout.

Yeah, that could work.

On matters relating to his baseball team, Hyde provided a few other thoughts.

Please note this interview took place before the O's weekend agreements with Tyler O'Neill and Gary Sanchez. And he cannot publicly talk about that pair anyway until the O's make those signings official. That seems likely to come this week during the Winters Meetings in Dallas. 

The Orioles have agreed to a contract with a right-handed hitter with thump, filling one key need on their offseason wish list. They came to terms with free agent outfielder Tyler O’Neill on a three-year deal for $49.5 million. The deal has yet to be officially announced.

O’Neill is the first free agent the O’s acquired with a multi-year deal since Mike Elias took over as general manager. He can opt out after the 2025 season, which would essentially make this a one-year deal.

O’Neill, who turns 30 on June 22, last year for Boston made 56 starts in left field, 34 in right field and 17 as the DH. His addition seems to make it quite unlikely now that the O’s will re-sign free agent outfielder Anthony Santander.

O'Neill was named the Red Sox Comeback Player of the Year by the Baseball Writers' Association of America's Boston chapter. O’Neill missed 27 games due to three stints on the injured list. He went to the seven-day concussion IL on April 18 and also went on the IL May 29 with right knee inflammation and Aug. 7 with a lower leg infection.

Over 113 games and 473 plate appearances with Boston, he hit .241/.336/.511/.847 with a 132 OPS+ that was just below Santander’s 134.

For Orioles lefty Trevor Rogers, the key to getting some velocity back and hopefully his previous big league form with it could come from his legs.

During this previous interview here with Rogers, he said weight room work will be big for him this winter. And that he learned via trips to Driveline Baseball in Phoenix, that his lower body strength was not what was needed. 

“The Orioles and Driveline, we’ve been in constant communication, just making sure we are all on the same page,” said Rogers, 27. “We looked at the numbers and my lower body strength was far below average. So, it correlates with velocity.

“To be honest I was happy to see that. If everything was right in the middle or average, we might have a bigger question. But knowing that was lacking and it contributed to my lower velocity, I was excited to know there is an answer. And I can work to attain the goal of getting stronger.”

Last year Rogers was traded from Miami to the Orioles on July 30^th for Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers. He had a 7.11 ERA in four O’s starts before being sent to the minors where he finished the year at Triple-A Norfolk. He made one terrible start for the Tides (pitching when he was ill), but had an ERA of 2.96 his last four Tides starts.

We got more evidence last night that while the Orioles are very aware that their offense fell off big late last season, they still see an overall good offense and one that does not need a major change or overhaul.

We are talking about individuals working to make their own improvements, helping the team improve.

A Baltimore offense that ranked fourth in the majors in 2024 scoring 4.85 runs per game is not going to undergo massive alterations.

On the first edition for this winter of the Orioles “Hot Stove Radio Show” last night on WBAL Radio in Baltimore, O’s hitting coach Cody Asche was a guest.

He knows the offense was part of the blame for the team going 26-27 from Aug. 1 on. The Orioles scored one run in two playoff games.

It has been a somewhat slow Hot Stove season thus far in terms of signings. But the stove may be really about to get hot.

The biggest free agent prize – outfielder Juan Soto – may be close to signing and it could happen during the Winter Meetings that begin on Monday. He has been the most talked about player this offseason and that will hold up until he signs.

Will the dam burst after that?

This is what many in the industry seem to believe. Once Soto is off the market, teams may pivot to outfielders Anthony Santander and Teoscar Hernández and really kick off the pursuit of position players. Big dollar teams that miss out on Soto, could move back to the high-end starting pitcher market chasing the likes of Corbin Burnes and Max Fried.

Where does this leave the Orioles?