BALTIMORE – Yennier Cano said it surprised him at first.
The Baltimore Orioles’ right-handed reliever is having the best season of his pro career, one that has always been promising but sputtered last year when his original team, the Minnesota Twins, dealt him to the Orioles at the trade deadline.
This July, as Cano, 29, was about to play in his first All-Star game, he faced his old Twins club and many of his former teammates. There was plenty of catching up and well wishes. But there was something else, too, something that caught him off guard.
Several Twins pitchers wanted to know how they could acquire the Orioles’ secret sauce; Cano isn’t the only former member of the Twins organization to have thrived in Baltimore. Danny Coulombe and Tyler Wells have also had strong years for the team with the best record in the American League.
“I hear that a lot, to tell you the truth,” said Cano through Orioles interpreter Brandon Quinones. “I talk to (former Minnesota teammates) pretty regularly and they’ll tell me, ‘Man, how great would it be if I got traded over to where you guys are and got a nice adjustment or got things fixed that you guys got? Because it’s been working for you guys.’ Funny enough, it has been a conversation I’ve had with a few guys.”
Baltimore Orioles’ penchant for unlocking bullpen talent
For years, the opposite was true for the Orioles. They had plenty of highly regarded arms that, for one reason or another, they simply couldn’t unlock at the highest level. Some of those pitchers went on to impressive careers once they landed elsewhere.
In the past two seasons, however, under general manager Mike Elias, manager Brandon Hyde and big-league pitching coaches Chris Holt and Darren Holmes, the Orioles have become one of those envied organizations that appear to get the most out of castoff pitching.
The Tampa Bay Rays, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Guardians and Los Angeles Dodgers are teams that continually make lemonade out of discarded lemons on baseball’s scrap heap. Now, these Orioles are doing that consistently, from All Stars Félix Bautista, Cano and Jorge López (traded last August to the Twins for a package of four players including Cano) to other bullpen contributors such as Cionel Pérez, Jacob Webb, Shintaro Fujinami and Coulombe, among others. All were acquired via waivers, minor-league, free-agent signings or minor trades.
“Honestly, it has worked out for all of us who are here. And I think everyone sees that,” said Bautista, who was initially released by the Miami Marlins organization in 2015. “It’s just crediting our staff, our pitching coaches and everyone who gives us that confidence to go out there and do what we do. And they just continue to refine us and make us better every day.”
Holt, who is in his third season as Orioles’ big-league pitching coach/director of pitching, said the success the acquired relievers have had has really been part of a process: the identification of talent by Elias and his scouts/developers; the willingness of the players to accept the philosophy of pitching to their strengths; and the work they put in with pitching strategy coach Ryan Klimek before and during games.
“I would argue that we didn’t fix Bautista. We didn’t fix Cano. I think that what you want to do is have them identify and buy into what they do when they’re at their best and focus on doing that,” Holt said. “And that way you’re not working something new with them. You’re working with something that they already do. They just don’t do it as consistently well as they are capable of doing it.”
‘You don’t have to be a great bunch’
For the past decade or more, the Rays have been the gold standard in building bullpens with players from other systems. Although their specific recipe – like the Orioles – is proprietary, the basic formula is easy enough to follow. The Rays target pitchers that do at least one thing exceptionally well, whether that’s throwing heat or spinning the ball effectively or exhibiting impeccable command with a plus-pitch. The Rays’ coaches seemingly build from that strength going forward.
The Orioles have a similar approach, although many of their reclamation projects, by no coincidence, possess power arms and excellent strikeout numbers. It makes sense, since high-voltage velocity remains the hardest thing to hit in baseball.
“It makes it a lot simpler to have conversations with those individuals because they don’t have to be perfect. The expression we sometimes use is, ‘You don’t have to be great a bunch. You just need to be good a bunch and be consistent at being good,’” Holt said. “You’ll get some great pitches, but if you try to be great and perfect with your locations all the time, they end up as misses a lot of the time. So, our goal really is to let them be aggressive and attack the zone.”
That’s been the difference, says Cano, who made a minor tweak with his delivery this offseason to keep himself more balanced. But he said the primary reason for his success is that he is now confident in his game plan and his quality of pitches when he goes out to the mound. Cano had an 11.50 ERA in 18 innings with the Twins and Orioles in 2022; he has a 1.57 ERA in his first 63 innings this season.
“The biggest key is just the confidence that the pitching coaches give you here. They just tell us to be us. They don’t try to make us someone that we’re not,” Cano said. “You might go to another organization and the coaches might not give you that same confidence. They’ll try to switch you or adjust you to certain things. Here, they stick to what you do well, and they try to improve that.”
The proof is in the bullpen-wide numbers. In 2021, when Holt, Holmes, Elias and Hyde dealt with a revolving door of relievers – almost as if they were conducting a tryout at the big-league level – the club’s bullpen ERA was 5.70, 30th of 30 major-league teams. The Orioles jumped to ninth last year in bullpen ERA and are currently 6th, with a 3.54 mark heading into Monday’s play.
Their fearlessness with the scrap heap was evident recently, when the Orioles, looking for relief reinforcements, added two under-the-radar acquisitions: Fujinami, the Japanese fireballer with an 8.57 ERA as a starter/reliever in his first year with the Oakland Athletics; and Webb, who has three effective pitches, including a mid-90s fastball, but was put on waivers in early August by the Los Angeles Angels after compiling a 3.98 ERA in 29 games.
Webb has been fantastic for the Orioles, compiling nine straight scoreless outings with the club before giving up two runs Saturday. Fujinami has been more enigmatic in his 16 outings for the Orioles; sometimes he’s been unhittable and other times he’s struggled with command and the longball. Still, his ERA is 4.76 with the Orioles, a significant drop from Oakland.
“It’s not like they have a perfect pitching mechanics (program) that fits for everybody. There are others teaching pitching mechanics like that,” Fujinami said through interpreter Issei Kamada. “But I would rather talk to them and communicate with them and work more on a mental approach. Whatever you need for that pitcher is what they provide. So, definitely, they are one of the most attractive teams for pitchers with (big-league) stuff, but less command.”
The Orioles have also had some success developing inexperienced starters in the past couple years, but that’s trickier given the importance of utilizing several quality pitches to navigate lineups multiple times. That process usually takes longer.
It’s the identifying and cultivating of relievers that has been the Orioles’ forte since 2021.
That strength, however, will be tested in the last month of the season and likely into the postseason. Bautista, who has a 1.48 ERA, 33 saves and an astounding 16.2 strikeouts per nine in 61 innings this season, injured his ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow Friday night.
Although the severity has not been revealed, the 6-foot-8 Bautista, known in Baltimore as “The Mountain,” is probably out for the season and potentially 2024 if he undergoes Tommy John surgery.
That means Cano is stepping into the closer’s role now and several of the Orioles’ other finds – Fujinami, Webb, Perez, Coulombe, and maybe Tyler Wells and homegrown lefty DL Hall – will have to assume higher leverage situations.
Filling Bautista’s massive shoes won’t be easy, but the Orioles have created enough depth with their shrewd relief acquisitions that they still have enough momentum to keep moving on toward the postseason.
Dan Connolly is an MLB Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.