Orioles acquire Flaherty from Cardinals (updated)

The Orioles found their starting pitcher less than 10 minutes before the trade deadline.

Executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias acquired right-hander Jack Flaherty from the Cardinals in exchange for Triple-A left-hander Drew Rom and infielder César Prieto, and Single-A Delmarva pitcher Zack Showalter.

Flaherty, 27, is a pending free agent who’s 7-6 with a 4.43 ERA and 1.550 WHIP in 20 starts, with only 10 home runs surrendered in 109 2/3 innings. He registered a 3.30 ERA in five starts last month.

Elias made it a stated goal to find more pitching to strengthen the club’s bid for a deep run in the playoffs. Starters beyond Kyle Gibson are approaching or have bypassed their career highs in innings.

The decision to option Tyler Wells to Double-A Bowie, where he reported earlier today, increased the urgency.

Flaherty was the 34^th-overall pick in the 2014 draft who’s gone 41-31 with a 3.58 ERA and 1.185 WHIP in 122 games and has averaged 10 strikeouts per nine innings. He finished fifth in National League Rookie of the Year voting in 2018 and fourth in Cy Young voting the following year, when he posted a 2.75 ERA and league-leading 0.968 WHIP and 6.2 hits per nine innings.

"A very talented starting pitcher that bolsters our rotation and our pitching staff as a whole down the stretch," Elias said in a video call.

"A player that we were targeting and a deal that we liked, that made sense for both teams. I think the big takeaway for me is that Jack's got a lot of good experience in a great organization. He's a very athletic pitcher with four really quality pitches, up to 97 (mph), works in the mid-90s. All of his pitches grade above-average from a scouting perspective. And we need help with the innings load down the stretch. We've got a lot of young starters that haven't done this before. We've got members of our relief corps that are injured or tired, and so we were just looking for pitching help in all shapes and sizes."

Flaherty’s name came up in talks at the 2017 Winter Meetings, when clubs sensed that the Orioles had made Manny Machado available – despite denials from former executive Dan Duquette. Flaherty was part of the asking price, according to a source, but the Orioles held onto Machado until July 2018. He went to the Dodgers.

The new regime got him while operating as buyers rather than sellers. The team and pitcher in much different phases than in 2017.

"I think he's experienced, and the accomplishments he's made over there, it probably makes him our second-most-experienced starter," Elias said. "We've got some young guys who are doing really, really well. I don't really care what the order of our rotation is. If we're fortunate enough to get in the playoffs and we see who our opponent is and how the matchup is, we'll set the rotation order at that point. But right now we've got more than five guys with Flaherty in the fold, Cole Irvin, Tyler Wells. They've proven they can do it at this level. And that's what it takes.

"We've got an above-average bullpen, we have a filled-to-the-brim position-player roster. This is a good team, and I don't think there's a ton of hierarchy in this rotation. And I think he goes right in with the best in our group."

Because Flaherty hasn’t pitched since July 26, he could. theoretically. be available in the Blue Jays series in Toronto. Wells vacated Thursday’s spot.

"He's got to join the team and get on board and all that," Elias said, "so we don't have any specific plans about when he might pitch, but hopefully very soon."

Flaherty was a priority from the beginning, but conversations with other executives were ongoing until 6 p.m.

"We got very close to some things," Elias said. "We took some very big swings, and some things came close. The trade deadline's really hard because when you start working on something, you block off opportunities elsewhere. You can get locked up and you don't really know if it's going to go to fruition. It's just a hard thing to navigate. It's very, very challenging. It can be tense. This was as tense of one as I've seen, and as challenging of one that I've seen, but he was one of the pitchers that, from the very get-go of our planning, we circled as a fit.

"We weren't sure whether St. Louis was going to sell. They kind of made the decision to do that about a week ago. They had a few guys that we were talking to them about. But glad this worked out."

Rom is the No. 18 prospect in the system, per MLB Pipeline, who was called up to the Orioles earlier this year but didn’t pitch. He’s registered a 5.34 ERA and 1.698 WHIP in 19 games with Norfolk.

Prieto in the No. 16 prospect, and he's blocked by other infielders in the system. The Orioles signed him to a $650,000 bonus in January 2022 as part of the international draft class.

Prieto, 24, is hitting a combined .349/.393/.475 in 85 games between Bowie and Norfolk.

The Orioles selected Showalter in the 11^th round in 2022 from Wesley Chapel High School in Florida. He has a 3.54 ERA and 1.426 WHIP in six games (five starts) with Delmarva, striking out 25 batters in 20 1/3 innings.

Elias addressed the bullpen on July 19 by acquiring hard-throwing Japanese right-hander Shintaro Fujinami from the Athletics for Triple-A pitcher Easton Lucas. He also swung a minor league trade this afternoon, sending reliever Eduard Bazardo to the Mariners for pitcher Logan Rinehart.

No other deals were made today.

"I think as we went into this deadline period, we were almost exclusively fixated on pitching," Elias said. "It came in the form of both starting pitching and relief pitching. Our pursuits, and they happened up and down the entire spectrum of the trade market, and we're very pleased that this is where we landed."

The Orioles were linked to numerous starters that kept tumbling off the board or were kept by their teams. They reportedly made a run at Justin Verlander before the Mets traded him to the Astros. They talked to the White Sox about ace Dylan Cease, who wasn't moved.

"It was a very challenging market," Elias said. "People have commented that this was a seller's market, but it seemed like the landscape and the standings and the rules in place with the extra wild card combined to create a very small number of selling teams. I am happy that we were able to make what I view to be a quality trade and a good acquisition, and somebody that checks off a need for us here going down the stretch."

Concerns about innings and workloads trickle down to the bullpen. Fujinami is the only outside acquisition, but the Orioles are banking on relievers rejoining them from the injured list, which currently holds Mychal Givens, Austin Voth, Keegan Akin and Dillon Tate. John Means is targeting a Sept. 1 return, with no assurances that he goes back into the rotation. DL Hall is mentioned as a possibility after returning to Norfolk from a strengthening program in Sarasota and two appearances in the Florida Complex League.

Wells also could be a consideration for relief after his stint at the pitching lab in Bel Air and games pitched with Bowie.

"I think right now we've had some spots in the bullpen in flux, but we've got some guys getting healthy, we've got some players coming up through the system," Elias said. "And bringing in an extra starter, you can always spill over into the bullpen to help with those innings. And I think we have several legitimate, accomplished major league starting pitchers, all of whom are having good years right now. And if any one of those five aren't in the rotation in a given time or a given week, we could see fit to deploy them in the bullpen."

Asked how close he came to trading for a reliever, Elias said, "Pretty close."

"We were, even as we got the Flaherty trade done at the last couple of minutes, we still had an appetite to bring in relief depth or relief options. It just didn't happen," he said.

"This is a tough thing because you go into the trade deadline, you don't have control over it. It's not like the draft, where you just pick who you want. The other side has to agree and they've got other stuff. And sometimes you put the ball in their court and the ball doesn't come back to you and you wait. It happens. Because of how tough it is, I think we're particularly pleased that we found a trade that we really like that I think is very good for this team."

"We think this team has what it takes to go deep, and this bolsters us. I think it gives us a lot of security and a boost to the rotation down the stretch."

The day also was viewed as a success based on the cost. None of their prospects in MLB Pipeline's top 100. None from their own top 15. No one subtracted from the 26-man roster.

Parting with the surplus isn't easy, but the Orioles made it as painless as possible.

"I think the Cardinals got a great deal here," said Elias, who worked in St. Louis and still has contacts.

"We've got a lot of infielders. We can't keep them all. Everybody talks about that all the time.

"You look at the trades this year, these were huge returns even for the rentals. I think that this landed in an appropriate spot for both teams. I'm sure these players will go on to have very fruitful careers, but 2023 is a priority. I've spoken before about how my job is balancing that priority against the future, and not doing an exchange that we will overly regret or be unwise. And I think this landed in the right spot in that regard."

Other teams naturally asked for young players that the Orioles weren't comfortable surrendering.

"Look, the top of our prospect list is as good as is out there," Elias said. "We've got eight or nine or 10 top 100 guys right now, depending on how you look at it or how you put the different lists together. It took a long time to get people off that part of the list. 

"We've got some depth and some guys playing the same positions and all that, and people wanted to tap into that. We were willing to in certain scenarios. Had some really big stuff get down the pike, but I only can control our side of it and people go in directions they're going to go, and that's what this is all about.

"We were willing to deploy every corner of our farm system within reason to make acquisitions, and we just make a calculated value exchange of what we're losing, and then the players that we're getting back, and then with the appropriate sort of emphasis on the near term for 2023, 2024, or depending on the amount of control that those guys had.

"We might have a couple of players, and I won't name them, that we wouldn't trade for anyone in baseball, but other than that, you've got to be prepared to look up and down. A lot of teams really fixated on a lot of players that we had that we just didn't feel were appropriate to go in those deals, and it's part of why this went to the last minute with us."