I’ve wanted to revisit some ideas about big rebuilds and what comes next, so I started looking into it around the All-Star Break. However, the process sort of spiraled into something bigger, and as it went on, I realized that the first half of the article was a little more timely than the back-half. So rather than finish the whole thing and then start making decisions on publishing and where to divide it, I made the call to just preemptively split it up and publish the first part before it got too out-of-date, while still working on the back-half. As a result, I can’t really promise when Part 2 will be coming just yet, but it will hopefully be soon.
Over the last few seasons, I’ve been maintaining something of a series where I look at rebuilding teams. The main focus initially was comparing the complete teardown and rebuild of the circa-2020 Orioles with the one pulled off by the early-2010s Astros, since there were a lot of similarities in the two (including a shared lineage of personnel). A few other rebuilds also got mentioned over the course of those articles, but I eventually got around to a piece centered around the Braves’ retooling as a contrasting method. Ever since then, I’ve had a sort of mental connection between all of them.
The last piece in that series came over two years, right at the start of the 2023 season, and that looked like the end of things. The Orioles would roar out to a division title (their first since 2014) and 101 wins (their first 100-win season since 1980). The only team ahead of them was that Braves team, who won 104 games and looked to be moving into the peak years of their dynasty following their 2021 title.*
*Also, all stats in this piece are going to be from Baseball-Reference or Fangraphs.
If that had been the end, it would have been a satisfying conclusion to a long process. The Orioles’ rebuild finally paid off, the Braves’ kicked into high gear, the end. 2024 didn’t go quite as smoothly for either team, as both fell to second in their division and around the 90 win mark. But hey, there’s always some randomness over 162 games and following up a 100-win season can be hard. The important thing was that they made it back to the playoffs. And sure, those playoff runs ended poorly, but again, that happens sometimes. Both of them would be well equipped to try and come back the next year in 2025…
You almost certainly know how that’s gone so far. Those 2024 swoons look less like bad-luck blips and more like omens for what was to come. At the 2025 All-Star Break, the two had near-identical records (43-52 for Baltimore, 42-53 for Atlanta) and were both around a dozen games out of the division, with only the faintest hopes of a second-half comeback. It’s difficult to decide which one is the bigger disappointment.
No success is ever permanent, but you’d usually like them to last a little longer than that, and maybe wind down a little more gradually over a few years rather than just suddenly dropping off a cliff. You don’t reach the heights of success that they do without multiple things going very right, and you don’t fall to the division basement without a lot of things going wrong; usually, it’s difficult going from one of these states to the other on a dime like that. Since I put so much effort into looking at the rise of these teams, I figured why not also take a look at this moment to see what diverted those rises? And maybe I can even turn those thoughts into a broader point about team rebuilding, and further explore the themes from that original series.
I feel like the more obvious one to address is the Orioles: they don’t have enough depth generally, and their pitching especially stinks. As of 7/27, their pitching staff has both the fourth-worst ERA and fourth-worst FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), and they’re closer to the Rockies and A’s at the bottom of both rankings than they are to even the middle of the league. You can try and break it down more if you want, but the long-short of it is just “they give up way too many hard-hit balls, especially home runs”.
This isn’t really a bad-luck thing, nor was it a complete surprise heading into 2025. The team already looked thin last season, and that was before they lost their only real great pitcher in Corbin Burnes to free agency. Young guns Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells were still out for Tommy John Surgery, and could maybe pick up innings down the stretch, but you’d need to get there first. More established arm John Means was also rehabbing from the same injury, but they let him walk (he still has not appeared in a game this season). And Grayson Rodriguez wasn’t dealing with UCL issues, but he did miss the last few months of 2024.
Not having enough innings from top-tier starters was always going to be an issue, but for the 2025 Orioles, it also wasn’t clear that they’d have enough bulk innings, either. Having back-end rotation guys or middle relievers isn’t really sexy, but having competent arms there can absorb some of the wear-and-tear of a season, and maybe even keep games close enough to win with a big day from the offense. Cole Irvin was basically a replacement-level starter in 2024, but he did throw 107.1 innings, fifth-most on the staff. Danny Coulombe and Jacob Webb, both of whom left in free agency, combined for nearly 90 innings out of the bullpen, and they were even above-average ones at that! Craig Kimbrel, Dillon Tate, and Burch Smith were… honestly, not great, but they did combine for over 110 innings in relief, and they’d all need to be replaced as well.
You can already see the math here getting daunting. The 2025 Orioles would need to replace about 40% of their total innings from 2024, including their best 15%. Felix Bautista returning from Tommy John would take care of some of that, adding some top tier innings. Mid-year trade pickups Zach Eflin, Seranthony Dominguez, Gregory Soto, and Trevor Rogers would all be able to throw more innings for the team in 2025, although all of them besides Eflin struggled after the deadline. The big offseason signings were 41-year-old Charlie Morton, 35-year-old reliever Andrew Kittredge, and 35-year-old NPB veteran Tomoyuki Sugano, with 37-year-old Kyle Gibson signed as an emergency at the end of Spring Training.
Add that all together, and you can maybe see where they thought they would get the ~600 total innings they needed if everything generally broke well, but there was a lot of risk and question marks to get to that point. And it was pretty clear that absolutely no part of it would match the quality of the ~200 innings from Burnes. That would require a younger arm stepping up, which also seemed like a bit of a gamble.
It especially didn’t help that the best young breakout candidate, Rodriguez, missed all of Spring Training with elbow issues, instantly calling into question whether he could even replicate his 116 solid innings from 2024 (he still hasn’t pitched this year, and may not make it back before season’s end). On top of that, 35-year-old Albert Suarez left his first start of the year in just the third inning with shoulder problems (there’s still no update on when he’ll be back), meaning that arguably their best returning 2024 starter (and definitely their biggest work-horse, behind Burnes) has provided nothing in 2025 either. The team’s pitching strategy already looked thin in the best circumstances, and immediately had major holes blown through it right from the season start.
The “upside” here is that at least the atrocious pitching hasn’t wasted a great year from the offense; while it hasn’t been the disaster that the pitching staff has been, the lineup has been a bit of a mess in its own right. Basically, the only 2024 Orioles who have substantially improved in 2025 are first-time All-Stars Ryan O’Hearn and Kyle Stowers, except the latter of those was traded to Miami* last year as part of the Trevor Rogers deal. Jackson Holliday has also taken a step forward, which is great for a 21-year-old, but he still doesn’t look like he can carry an offense.
*I feel bad complaining about this too much, since part of the purpose of having a stacked farm system is to use in trades, and sometimes trading prospects just doesn’t work out. But at the same time… trading two prospects for a pitcher like Rogers, who was clearly a reclamation project at the time, certainly seems questionable, even with two and a half seasons of team control left. And it’s great that Rogers eventually wound up stepping up this year and looking like the best pitcher on a decimated Orioles staff, but again, it took several months in the minors between the end of 2024 and the start of this season to get to that point. But maybe things will even out a little more in time.
Everyone else has looked worse in 2025. Gunnar Henderson at least makes some sense, starting the year late due to Spring Training injuries that lingered into the start of the year. He’s been looking like an All-Star again over time, and it’s not like you can expect the kind of MVP-level season he put up last year every year. Even the best players will sometimes “just” be All-Stars.
The more glaring problem is that all of the other players who were supposed to help cover for that circumstance also haven’t gotten it done. Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser have both been okay but worse than last year, on top of missing a lot of time to injuries. Adley Rutschman is the same, although given that it’s a drop-off from his 2024, which was already a drop-off from his 2023, it’s fair to see it as a worrisome trend.
Meanwhile, the guys who were supposed to fill out the lineup around them have struggled in their own ways. Former top prospects Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad have just looked outright bad. Big free agent Tyler O’Neill has been a non-factor when not injured (although at least last-minute pick-up Ramon Laureano has been playing well enough to cover in the meantime), and Ryan Mountcastle has been hitting like a glove-first shortstop while actually playing first base. And of course, injuries have played a part here (it’s never great when your 40 Man Roster has six catchers listed, to account for four of them currently being on the Injured List). The pitching problems were more foreseeable as a consequence of bad roster construction, but the lineup’s problems just make it seem like a snakebitten season all-around.
Does this negatively impact the outlook for 2026 and beyond? Eh… probably not? Losing what was supposed to be a season in your competitive window is tough, but the core members are all around for two more seasons or longer, and hoping for better injury luck is a pretty normal part of things turning around after a down season. And there are even a few upcoming free agents they can flip at the deadline this season to help shore things up down the line (relievers Bryan Baker and Gregory Soto have already been dealt).
For as much as the pitching has been an issue, it’s hard to imagine them entering another season this thin again (especially since Wells and Bradish should be back this year). The new ownership group has seemed open to spending, and even if a top arm doesn’t become available, we’ve even seen some recent teams (like the Royals) build a solid rotation by just playing the second-tier free agent market well. Overall, things just seem bad right now, not actively worrisome in the long-term.
In contrast to all of that, the Braves’ disappointing season is much stranger.* In some ways, they’re still fairly snake-bitten in their own way; for example, as of 7/27, their record is 44-59, but that’s 6 games behind their Pythagorean record, tied for the biggest negative disparity in the league. A slightly-below-.500 record would still be a disappointment for this team given where they started, but it would also half the number of games they have to make up in the Wild Card standings, and increase the chances for them to turn things around in the second half. That’s not nothing, especially since there are some easy potential improvements there (like more games from Ronald Acuña Jr., who was absent until late May; or Spencer Strider settling in more from his return from Tommy John surgery).
But the more material cause of the change is obvious. The 2024 Braves were a playoff team with a more-or-less average offense (101 wRC+), and they’re a bad team this season despite only a slight drop on that side of the ball (98 wRC+). The real change is that the 2024 Braves had probably the best pitching staff in the majors (including the best FIP by a decent margin, and a tie for the best ERA), and now it’s decidedly middle of the pack (sixteenth in FIP, nineteenth in ERA). Those certainly look like the signs of a boring, slightly-below-average team, then throw the bad luck on top of that and viola.
Like the Orioles, they lost a great starter to free agency over the offseason (Max Fried), and immediately lost their surprise 30-something 2024 breakout arm (Reynaldo Lopez) to a bad shoulder injury in his first start. Their back-end innings eater also left in free agency, in this case to the Orioles (although Charlie Morton is a much bigger loss than Irvin). Also like the Orioles, they were hoping for a strong return from a UCL injury (Strider), although in a key difference, Strider was actually pitching during Spring Training, so that expectation was a little more plausible.
There are a few major differences here too, though. They still had reigning Cy Young winner Chris Sale; sure, he was a 36-year-old who would probably see some regression, but it seems reasonable to expect him to still be good in 2025 (which he has been!). And while they probably wouldn’t have the stability they did in ‘24 (only seven starters made more than 2 starts, a number they’ve already matched this year), they actually had some depth there. The younger and back-end options there haven’t quite stepped up, hence the drop-off, but they haven’t been as short-staffed as the O’s. Also, a big challenge has been the bullpen almost uniformly getting worse, which feels… maybe not like it was totally out of the question, since predicting relievers from year to year still feels like a fool’s errand at times, but still like getting the extreme bad luck of the draw.
You can maybe harp on the front office for not doing more to shore up the pitching in the offseason, and I wouldn’t blame you. But there’s another major issue, one that does more to explain the Braves’ failure to reach the Juggernaut Team status that so many expected they would reach in the last few years: the offense. Yes, this is a lineup that’s been in the lower end of the middle of the pack the last two seasons, but they actually had the best wRC+ in the majors by a large margin just before that in 2023! (126, 9 points above second place.)
What’s even stranger is how abruptly and seemingly from-out-of-nowhere this crisis has hit them. Seven of the nine regulars* from that 2023 lineup are still starters this year, and the average age this season is still just 28.5. Maybe the Braves should have done more to shore up their pitching, but I imagine at least part of their thinking was “we’ll make up for any decline there when the offense bounces back”, and it simply hasn’t.
*And the two changes, Orlando Arcia and Eddie Rosario, were still on the team at the start of the season! Rosario^ was a lucky 2023 fill-in, and mostly a bench option on the outs already by this season; but 30-year-old Arcia, who was mostly just “okay offense for a shortstop” was cut back in May with an eye-wateringly bad .445 OPS. Maybe it’s not fair to lump him with the rest of the guys still on the team since he was never quite the same pedigree, but this is still yet another guy whose bat seemed to just rot away before even reaching age 30.
^Also, it’s probably also worth mentioning that the real strategy in left field for the Braves this season was Jurickson Profar, a major offseason signing that showed the front office recognized this spot needed to be addressed in some way. The problem there was that Profar immediately wound up getting suspended 80 games for PEDs, which feels like another thing that falls more on the “bad luck” side of things.
Acuña has remained a force when his body allows, which can be a problem, but he’s already surpassed his 2024 season in both games played this season and quality of those games. Matt Olson has remained a stellar addition in the post-Freddie Freeman era. Fellow A’s acquisition Sean Murphy remains a great hitter for a catcher, and new call-up Drake Baldwin is also good enough to merit at-bats on days where he isn’t catching.
The other half of the line-up is much more dubious, though. Marcell Ozuna at least makes sense, as a 34-year-old DH in the final year of a big contract; you would expect some kind of decline in that kind of situation, that’s basically just how big free agent deals work these days. The other three are much more shocking.
Ozzie Albies, up until 2023, was generally an average or above-average bat, a solid thing to have at second base. 2023 looked like it might be a breakout year, and he progressed to a 125 wRC+, but he fell back to a little below average in an injured 2024, and has gotten even worse in a healthy 2025. He has a 76 wRC+, including a sub-.300 OBP, in his age-28 season. Sure, that’s usually thought of as a peak season, but some guys peak earlier than others… Granted, given that Albies was locked in to a long, team-friendly deal, there’s maybe more reason to find it worrisome.
There’s also Austin Riley, who from 2021 to 2023 was arguably the best-hitting third baseman in the league, and it got him enough MVP support to finish top-10 in NL MVP voting in all three seasons. But 2024 saw him post his worst offensive numbers since before his 2021 breakout, and he’s only gotten worse this year. His 109 wRC+ isn’t bad, but you’d definitely like to see a little more than that from a bat-first third baseman, and it’s a big presence in the lineup to suddenly disappear. Also, like Albies, Riley’s fade has coincided with his age-27 and -28 seasons, and he’s signed to an even bigger and longer team-friendly extension, making $22 million a year through at least 2032; one time is an oddity, two times is a coincidence.
And the trend would then be Michael Harris II. His contract is less worrisome ($59 million through at least 2030), but he’s also only 24 and has gotten worse every single season since his debut, making his fade even more worrisome. Maybe he wasn’t going to hit as well as his rookie season (137 wRC+) as Major League pitchers caught up to him, and you could live with an above-average center fielder who hit like he did in 2023 (116) or even 2024 (99). But his 2025 numbers have just been awful, the worst qualified hitter in the league according to wRC+ (50, thanks to a .214/.237/.322 batting line).*
*Edit: I had this all written up, and then the Saturday evening before publishing, Harris went 4-4, hitting 2 triples falling a single short of the cycle. That one game helped get his batting line to .225/.250/.361, and his 64 wRC+ is now only tied for fourth-worst in the majors. The main point stands for now, but for any fan who was searching for some hope, you can start there.
Again, one-year blips happen, even to great players, but these are three franchise cornerstones all in the midst of multi-year struggles, two of which are locked up until the end of the decade or longer. I’m not really sure I’m qualified to explain what specifically is going wrong there, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a problem of some kind. And it’s the kind of problem that the front office was able to work around last year through that strong rotation, but this year has been a different story. There’s still time to turn it around and make a few more runs at the postseason, and I’m sure Riley and Harris at least will get plenty of opportunities to do so (Albies still has two more seasons on his deal, but they’re both cheap team options). But every year that those guys don’t put it back together will be seasons that more or less ride or die on the health of Acuña and the pitching staff.
That’s the “Why” for these team’s struggles, plus a little preview for what it means going forward. But this series has usually relied on looking at the rebuild as a whole, not to mention a certain level of comparison to what’s been the most successful rebuilding process in recent memory,* the 2010s Astros.
*Just thinking aloud: is it the most successful rebuild in baseball history at this point? That feels like a big question, one that I don’t necessarily feel like tackling at the end of a Part 1 of a longer piece; there’s a lot of baseball history to cover, and it might require some narrowing of what specifically counts as a Rebuild in the first place. But given the scale of the tear-down plus the eventual turn-around… it’s got to be on the short-list for first-place, right?
It’s actually kind of funny, because Houston so far in 2025 has actually suffered from a lot of the same problems as Baltimore and Atlanta. There were some real concerns about depth heading into the year, especially because one of the mitigating factors on the pitching front was supposed to be pitchers returning from Tommy John surgery (Luis Garcia and Christian Javier, neither of whom has appeared at the Major League level yet this season, plus 2023 stalwart JP France, who is still only starting to return from shoulder problems). They lost big-name stars in Alex Bregman and Kyle Tucker, 2024 surprise 30-year-old breakout pitcher Ronel Blanco also suffered an early season-ending elbow injury, big names like Yordan Alvarez, Yainer Diaz, and Christian Walker have all been underwhelming and/or injured, and they recently placed their 18th player of the season (and 8th starting pitcher) on the Injured List.
And yet… they’re in the running for the best record in the AL right now.* There’s a chance they fade down the stretch, but given where they started the season and how it’s gone in the abstract, I’d still count that as a surprising success. Even going .500 the rest of the way would get them to about 90 wins; the single most optimistic preseason prediction from The Crawfish Boxes this year had them at 91 wins. I think if you went back in time and warned us back then that Yordan would miss three or more months or the season and Blanco wouldn’t make it until the end of May, I think most of the staff would have started demanding the team trade upcoming free agent Framber Valdez immediately to maximize his return.
*Edit: I wrote this part at the end of last week. The Astros spent the weekend getting swept by the A’s, but the Tigers also went 1-3 against the Blue Jays, meaning Houston is still in second place in the AL overall ahead of Detroit, but a little further behind Toronto now. I suppose we’ll see if this rough weekend was a turning point or just a blip against a bad team; the latter isn’t exactly unheard of, but the injury news continues to be rough. Either way, Houston will get a home series against NL East cellar-dweller Washington to steady themselves leading up to the Trade Deadline.
The roster looked thinner entering this year, but they managed to have way more depth than anyone expected, even pulling off a solid series of wins against the other division leaders in the league. And while the absolute massive number of injuries have started to pile up and made things look pretty dire lately, they’re still treading water pulling out some wins along the way while working through a relative lull in the schedule.
I’ve pointed out in the past that the Astros seem to have a knack for developing talent these last few years, especially the kind of young or unfinished player that often gets overlooked. They’ve certainly kept that up this year, getting solid performances out of a number of bit players and bullpen guys (e.g: Mauricio Dubon, Victor Caratini, Brandon Walter, Bennett Sousa, Bryan King, Steven Okert…) in a way that the Braves and Orioles have struggled. And while their big star in Alvarez and big signing in Christian Walker have been relative non-factors on the year, they’ve continued to build and develop a core around the remaining Framber, with guys like Jeremy Peña, Isaac Paredes, Hunter Brown, Jake Meyers, and Cam Smith all stepping forward and having All-Star level seasons or better to make up the difference. Again, I can’t really remark on the specifics of what’s going on (especially since some of the differences in the team’s approaches to drafting and developing players are things we can’t really see or know), but the results are still pretty darn clear to see.
In a way, comparing the 2025 Astros to anyone feels like a weird comparison, because… I don’t know that we’ve seen any teams have a year like this? Few teams have to go this deep on the depth chart at all, and the ones that do usually overwhelmingly struggle in the process. It’s difficult to know how much of their success so far is good planning on the front office’s part cancelling out excess bad injury luck, versus Houston simply getting some good luck on their injury replacements in a way that’s eluded Baltimore and Atlanta. And we still haven’t even reached the end of the season, let alone see how this plays out in coming years.
But I actually do think there’s something to compare here, to get a better sense of where the Braves and Orioles might be going from this point forward, and if their post-rebuilding days are over or if their competitive window can be saved. But I want to widen the scope of where we’re looking a bit, and get a fuller appreciation of what Rebuilds look like once they move out of the rebuilding state. That’s a big question, and since this piece is already running a little long, probably one worthy of its own full article. If you’d like to be updated when Part 2 goes live, feel free to subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor email list below:
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
No comments:
Post a Comment