Flaherty didn’t put his best foot forward in his Orioles tenure, but bounced back in 2024.
I don’t want the Orioles to sign Jack Flaherty. He’s not really on my wish list. Other CC writers have covered my preferred guys. Flaherty’s post-trade performance with the team in 2023 was so poor that I don’t care to see him pitch for the team again. This is not a reaction rooted in rationality. Flaherty’s bounce-back performance this year does strongly suggest Mike Elias was probably right to think there was something better still in there somewhere.
My feelings about Flaherty in particular aside, we all know that the Orioles need to improve their starting rotation. I don’t believe that they will actually splash out the kind of cash that it would take to lure Corbin Burnes back, or sign Max Fried. They’ve been described as “reluctant” (from Ken Rosenthal in The Athletic) to sign any of the qualifying offer-attached free agents. (Elias told reporters yesterday that the Orioles are “in on everybody.”) Those assumptions made, there are only a few pitchers left who have the potential fit the bill. Flaherty is in that group.
By the end of Flaherty’s second full MLB season, he had one pretty good season under his belt and one great one. The 2019 season saw Flaherty post a 2.75 ERA with the Cardinals, keeping the WHIP under 1 as he struck out 231 batters in 196.1 innings. That’s an excellent beginning to a career. His problem is things went off track after that as he went on to battle either injuries or poor performance over the next four seasons before finding himself again this year.
What a find it was. After having to settle for a one-year “prove it” contract with the Tigers that still netted him $14 million, the Flaherty that Elias hoped he’d get after the trade last year showed up. With Detroit, Flaherty made 18 starts and averaged nearly six innings per start. These were quality innings, too: A 2.95 ERA and 0.956 WHIP. Flaherty was back to striking out batters at a rate like his early career and he’d cut his walk rate lower than it had ever been.
As the Tigers decided ahead of the trade deadline – incorrectly, as it turned out – that they weren’t going to make the postseason, they traded away Flaherty to the Dodgers. At least as far as the results were concerned, Flaherty couldn’t keep it quite at the same level.
In 10 starts with the eventual champions, Flaherty’s ERA jumped to 3.58, FIP to 4.16, and WHIP to 1.283. His strikeout rate slipped a little even as the walk rate returned to a more normal level. He also stunk in the postseason, not that this stopped the Dodgers from winning it all. Flaherty allowed 18 earned runs across 22 innings. Mike Mussina’s 1997 postseason, it wasn’t.
Flaherty’s Statcast array gives an excellent view of what his strengths were this season. He was very good at getting hitters to swing and miss (91st percentile whiff rate) and just about as good at limiting the free passes (83rd percentile walk rate). These two things were helped by how often he got batters to chase out of the strike zone (72nd percentile,) where most of the time batters will either miss or not do much damage.
When it comes to specific pitches, Flaherty’s curveball was a devastating asset. That’s a new thing that appears to have been unlocked for 2024, as even Flaherty’s past success was rooted more in achieving good outcomes with the fastball/slider combination. He’s averaging in the 93-94mph range on the fastball, same as earlier in his career. Now 29, Flaherty has not run into declining velocity yet. It’s just that other pitchers in the league are throwing harder now, so what used to be average velocity is now below.
With all that under consideration, who is the real Flaherty teams can expect to get for the next few years? If he’s somewhere in between how he pitched for the Tigers and how he pitched for the Dodgers, he’s absolutely going to be worth his next contract. If he goes back on the rollercoaster he was on in the 2020-23 seasons, he probably won’t be, and fans of his new team will find him a frustrating player, as Orioles fans have already experienced over a short timeframe.
At FanGraphs, Flaherty is projected for a four-year contract that pays $88 million. MLB Trade Rumors predicts a fifth year for Flaherty, kicking his total value to $115 million. If you have to pay for starting pitching, be it in trade or in free agent dollars, it’s not going to be cheap. $20 million per year is pretty much the price just to not get laughed out of the room even for a pitcher who is one year removed from having a 4.99 ERA and two years removed from making only eight starts.
The Orioles have already shown that they’ll sign a free agent who fits in this pattern this offseason. It’s not an exact comparison, but there are certainly similarities in Flaherty’s history to outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who (pending physical as of this writing) has a three-year deal worth $49.5 million from the O’s, with an opt out available after just one year of the contract.
There’s risk with this kind of player, but also it makes them cheaper than someone with a more consistent track record. Anthony Santander is expected to double up the guarantee to O’Neill; he’s played 150+ games each of the last three seasons and O’Neill’s only played 100+ twice in a seven-year career. Burnes and Fried also double up whatever Flaherty gets. If he had always been good and mostly durable, he’d be in the $200 million conversation like those guys.
At his best, Flaherty could be the #2 caliber starter who the Orioles currently need. At his worst, well, we’ve already seen that in Birdland. That’s why I don’t actually want the team to sign him. But if that’s the way Elias goes, it won’t be too hard to find some ways to talk myself into it working out okay.