Corbin Martin registered the save for the Orioles in the nightcap of Tuesday’s doubleheader with Toronto.
Just like we all imagined last spring week.
Of course, that came hours after right-hander Seranthony Dominguez became the third Baltimore reliever — joining Gregory Soto and Bryan Baker — to be traded by general manager Mike Elias since the second week of July. It’s not as though the Orioles selling off relievers before the trade deadline comes as any kind of shock after four months of last-place baseball, but what we didn’t anticipate was former All-Star closer Felix Bautista going on the injured list with right shoulder discomfort last week. The latest update was neither encouraging nor terribly enlightening.
“There’s a lot of swelling in the shoulder; [we] can’t quite make a determination quite yet or diagnose it,” interim manager Tony Mansolino said Monday. “Once the swelling goes down enough to scan it again, then we’ll have more information, and that’s gonna be probably more weeks than days.”
Even the best-case scenario sounds as though Bautista may have already thrown his last pitch in 2025. But the flame-throwing 30-year-old dealing with a shoulder injury less than two years after undergoing Tommy John surgery and missing all of 2024 doesn’t inspire much confidence that he’ll be ready to anchor a bullpen that will look much different next season. That makes the restocking of that group look even more daunting for a club that’s going to need a home run of an offseason to be back in serious contention in 2026.
Right-hander Yennier Cano and left-hander Keegan Akin are the only members of the Opening Day bullpen currently on the 26-man roster. The deadline status of right-hander Andrew Kittredge remains unclear as he carries a 2026 club option worth $9 million, which could be more appealing to Baltimore in the aftermath of the Bautista injury and the additional uncertainty it creates. Despite a knee injury that cost him the first eight weeks of the season, the 35-year-old Kittredge has mostly been as advertised with an ERA (3.56) and strikeout rate (9.1 per nine innings) in line with his career marks.
The Orioles certainly hope to see more consistency the rest of the way from Cano, a 2023 All-Star setup man who has pitched to an underwhelming 4.30 ERA this season and even had a brief stint at Triple-A Norfolk in late June. But the rest of 2025 for this bullpen is going to be about experimenting and keeping fingers crossed as even the most passionate Orioles fan would have a difficult time naming the entire group at the moment. There figures to be a steady roster churn with many of these names — Kade Strowd, Elvin Rodriguez, and Houston Roth to name a few — carrying minor-league options.
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Ideally, a couple of these unknowns will emerge as legitimate bullpen candidates for next spring, but even that won’t change the reality of how much heavy lifting Elias and the Orioles face in rebuilding this bullpen. And that’s before knowing the long-term prognosis for Bautista, who was having an encouraging season in his return from elbow reconstruction in October of 2023.
The Orioles may like their returns for Dominguez, Soto, and Baker and are certainly doing the right thing selling off veteran relievers on expiring contracts. But an area that’s already been regarded by many as somewhat of a blindspot for Elias over the years is a complete mystery for the rest of 2025 and beyond.
Just add that to the list of all that needs to go right this winter to get the disappointing Orioles back on track.
