The Orioles added a surprise reliever to their 40-man roster near the start of this offseason.
The team-building thought process of Mike Elias is rarely any harder to fathom than when he is adding random relievers into the roster mix. Another one of these relievers was plucked out of the Orioles system and onto the 40-man roster ahead of the Rule 5 draft protection deadline last November: 27-year-old right-hander Kade Strowd.
Strowd arrived in the Orioles organization in the 2019 draft, the first one where Elias was at the helm of the front office. The O’s selected him in the 12th round from West Virginia University, where the righty had mostly been a starting pitcher. Strowd’s pro career saw him jump into the bullpen immediately and that’s where he’s stayed ever since, throwing 106.2 innings across 81 relief appearances in the previous two seasons.
Note that as a 2019 draft pick from the college ranks, Strowd was actually Rule 5 draft eligible for the first time after the 2022 season. At that time, the Orioles added five players to their 40-man roster. Strowd, who thanks to the pandemic-canceled 2020 minor league season had never pitched above Aberdeen, was left out and was not selected. The Orioles did not add Strowd after the 2023 season either, and didn’t go selected in that draft as well.
It’s not hard to see why no other team would have jumped at the chance to pluck Strowd when looking at how he performed in that 2023 campaign. In his age 25 season and still just at the Double-A level, Strowd posted a 5.20 ERA and was particularly plagued by walks, handing out free passes at a BB/9 rate of 5.2. That’s an incredibly bad walk rate, one that stomps on any interest that might come from the 10.9 K/9 in the same period.
After several games at Bowie to start the 2024 season, the Orioles bumped Strowd up to Triple-A Norfolk, where he spent the remainder of the season. The good news is that in 37 games with the Tides, his strikeout rate escalated further to a 13.2 K/9. That’s good stuff, better than any 2024 Orioles pitcher’s MLB-level K/9 and ahead of everyone except for Félix Bautista from 2023.
The bad news about Strowd is that the walk rate was still bad. In fact, it was worse, floating up to a 5.9 BB/9. That is, he walked 27 batters in 41 innings, or about 14% of all Triple-A batters he faced in the 2024 season.
Pitchers are not very likely to succeed in MLB with that kind of walk rate. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Just two seasons ago, Blake Snell won the NL Cy Young while rocking a 5.0 BB/9. A more familiar name in Birdland, Tanner Scott, had a 5.5 BB/9 in his Orioles tenure but did finally find some command in his age 28 season. Scott was eventually able to convince a team to give him a four-year, $72 million contract over this offseason.
The 2024 FanGraphs top Orioles prospect list, which was belatedly posted at the end of last June, included Strowd as the #41 guy in the system. Summing up Strowd by saying “his stuff is too nasty to omit from the list,” they also wrote:
Strowd is a cutter-heavy kitchen sink reliever whose high-effort delivery compromises his ability to command the ball. Strowd’s whole-body delivery only has a modicum of consistency because of how short his arm action is. … Strowd spikes a ton of non-competitive pitches and even though he’s generating the highest swinging strike rate of any Norfolk Tides pitcher as of publication, he’s carrying an elevated ERA.
Orioles fans have experienced a lot of our lives where the team would have no chance of developing a fringe pitcher into something useful by cutting his walk rate. However, there are some recent success stories, including Bautista, who as recently as the season before his 2022 MLB debut had a 5.8 BB/9 across three minor league levels. Then, at the MLB level in his rookie season, Bautista cut that to a 3.2. That’ll work.
Can the Orioles pull off a similar transformation with an even later-blooming player in Strowd? If you really want to hang your hat on something, you might find it interesting that he did not walk anyone in nine September outings last year. That’s following an August where, though he did walk a bunch of guys, he held batters to a .214 average. Put these two things together and at least we can see why this time around, they gave him a shot.
If Strowd can keep that walk rate down, he’ll probably shuffle onto the major league roster this year. He’ll have a chance to stick around depending on how he looks if he gets a chance, and also depending on whether someone who’s an incumbent to the roster either gets hurt or pitches so poorly that he’s sent packing.