Baltimore Orioles: Growing and Maturing Young Pitchers

The Baltimore Orioles and all MLB teams need to go through a growing process with young pitchers that brings them along to maturity.

Unless a team wants to constantly pay top dollars for expensive free agent pitching, it simply takes time to develop young arms through the system. Few and few between are the highly-talented young pitchers that can enter the big leagues and be consistently effective. Though some early starts may look easy, the league will figure out a way to attack the new young arm, while the fledgling pitcher will need to, in turn, adjust also to the adjustments being made against him.

There really is no shortcut for success in this arena, but the effort is worth it in the long run. The challenge is to be able to do it successfully while also being a MLB team that is in contention. A good rotation will have some dependable veterans while also developing some younger talent.

The Orioles are going through this growth process with two rookie pitchers in particular, Mike Wright and Tyler Wilson. They are depending upon Chris Tillman to be an ace (which he has been for the most part this year), for Ubaldo Jimenez to be a veteran innings eater (mixed results there), and for Kevin Gausman to arrive as a dependable rotation piece (which appears to be happening). Along they way they also hope for Yovani Gallardo to return from injury problems. This is another story completely, but I’ll say here that I do not expect this to ever work out … though hopefully I’m wrong and he proves to be an amazing starter for the Orioles. I’m not betting on it.

But on the subject of young pitchers, and in particular reference to Tyler Wilson who lost to the Mariners yesterday, we can see this developmental project in process. It was illustrated in the game yesterday. Seattle scored a run in the first inning, but then Wilson settled down for a while. However, he gave up a second run in the fifth inning, before yielding a three-run blast to Adam Lind in the sixth.

We have seen this pattern with Wilson before. It is a bit of a challenge to settle into the game, then he is strong and effective, though troubles pile up toward the end of his outing. Even veteran pitchers can struggle to get the touch and settle into the early part of a game … Chris Tillman is infamous even yet for this proclivity. And then, toward the end of an outing, a pitcher needs the accumulated experience and savvy to get through the third time (or more) being seen by a batter, along with any tiring or drop-off in velocity or movement. This is not a natural skill; it is one that needs development, and it can’t happen anywhere but on a big league mound.

The statistics are evidentiary of this challenge for Tyler Wilson. Having now pitched in 17 career games and making 10 starts, he is 4-4 with a 3.59 ERA. That is more than workable.

Checking his batting average against numbers with his starts, he is at .247 for the first time through the batting order. Not too bad. But then when settling into the game it goes down to .184 for the second trip. However, on the third time through the lineup it increases to .370. It is obvious what needs to be worked on.