It’s July 10, 2025. The Detroit Tigers have the best record in baseball, we’re less than a week away from the first home-run-derby-style “Swing Off” in All-Star Game history, and Bryan Baker has just been traded from the Baltimore Orioles to the Tampa Bay Rays for the 37th overall pick in the upcoming draft. In general, a decent non-closing reliever getting traded to a team within his division is an unassuming occurrence. At the time of the deal, Baker had recently pitched his way into a setup role in a thin Orioles bullpen and was working on a mid-3s ERA with the best K-BB ratio of his career. This followed a tough and somewhat unlucky 2024 that resulted in a 5.01 ERA and saw him spend a chunk of the season in the minors.
His rebound, as well as his 3-plus years of remaining team control, made him a valuable trade chip for a Baltimore squad that fired manager Brandon Hyde after stumbling to a 15-28 record out of the gate, creating a hole too deep to climb out of in the unforgiving AL East. Meanwhile, Tampa was fully in the race, sitting in a wild card spot with a need for bullpen help. The Orioles cut their losses and got a high draft pick, the Rays got an extra bullpen arm before tailing off in the second half, Baker ran into home run problems pitching at windy Steinbrenner Field, and the postseason began with both of these teams on the couch at home.
The ramifications of this trade that have cascaded since that summer day nearly 11 months ago are larger than anyone could’ve predicted. Despite an aggressive offseason, the O’s have the 2nd-worst run differential in the AL and while their relief group hasn’t been the primary reason for that, they’re definitely in the middle of the pack. Tampa Bay’s bullpen has been worse, but the team itself is tied for the best record in baseball through the first 2 months of the season. They’ve rejected the very concept of hard-hit balls, embraced baserunning and low-scoring games, and not only is Bryan Baker now their closer, but he’s been one of the very best in the game.
At the time of writing, Cade Smith and Mason Miller are the only closers with more saves than Baker’s 14. He’s top-10 among AL relievers in Fangraphs WAR. While his xFIP is about 80 points higher than his 2.42 ERA, both FIP and xERA are believers in what he’s doing. He’s walking more batters than last year, 10.1% of them to be exact, but his 19.1% K-BB is still closer-quality. What’s happened in Tampa that didn’t happen in Baltimore?
It begins with his changeup. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the Rays are exploiting an inefficiency within current baseball strategy. In 2026, they lead MLB teams in right-on-right (and left-on-left) changeup usage. Over the past few years, the league has pursued different ways to spin the ball. Sweepers were born from gyro sliders, cutters are back in style, and many pitchers have multiple breaking ball shapes. By contrast, off-speed pitches are relatively underexplored. We don’t see many pitchers that use a changeup and a splitter, although this is changing. We also don’t see many pitchers use their off-speed weapons a considerable amount against same-handed batters. Off-speed optimization is, for now, a competitive advantage (part of the reason the Dodgers and Blue Jays made the World Series last year was their respective team-wide success with splitters), and the Rays are continuing to zag where others zig.
Baker is at the forefront of all this. Devin Williams is the only righty who has thrown a higher percentage of changeups to right-handed batters in 2026 (min. 50 pitch cutoff). He isn’t just using it more against righties either: Its overall usage is 45%, up from 28% last year, and it’s now his primary pitch against lefties. However, there’s nothing that stands out as immediately great about it. It only averages 85 MPH and doesn’t have outlier vertical or horizontal movement compared to the rest of the league. Once we look at its shape as a product of his arm angle, though, it begins to make sense. Baker has a high arm angle at 55°, which usually makes it very tough to throw a changeup at all, let alone generate significant arm-side run on it. Despite that, his changeup is averaging 15″ of run. For pitchers with his release traits, we’d expect 13″. Statcast’s spin-based metrics indicate he’s also leveraging seam-shifted wake better than most changeup throwers do. Guys with arm angles in that 55-60° territory shouldn’t be able to get changeups to tail like this, and because Baker can, the pitch is running a 54% groundball rate and opponents are hitting .136 against it.
He’s also doing an excellent job locating the pitch. Location models across the board pegged Baker’s changeup command as above-average in 2025, but it has gotten even better this year. He isn’t in the zone as much, but he has decreased the frequency of changeups thrown over the heart of the plate while throwing more in the shadow of the strike zone, a great recipe for avoiding damage. This isn’t a product of him adjusting his release positioning, but rather a tighter distribution of release angles. The ball is coming out of his hand the same way more often, which is often a foundational trait for plus command.
Bryan Baker Pitch Type Trajectory Overlay, 2026 (red = fastball, green = changeup, yellow = slider; Baseball Scouting Lab)
I’m not ready to declare him a top-5 bullpen arm in the sport or anything, but not many relievers are doing it like this. I’m sure this has been a painful read if you’re an Orioles fan, so I may as well warn you to click away now if you don’t want to be reminded of, in my opinion, the scariest part about all this. Remember that draft pick Baltimore got in return for Baker? They used it to select a Santa Monica-born high school outfielder and Vanderbilt commit by the name of Slater de Brun. This past winter, the Orioles traded de Brun back to Tampa Bay in a package for Shane Baz. Then, despite being relatively gun-shy about long-term contracts for pitchers, they immediately extended Baz to a 5-year, $68M contract, and his ERA and various ERA estimators all sit in the mid-to-high 4s.
While the Rays have a clear leg up right now, we’re still far away from being able to definitively tell who won this trade. His stuff and location may be worse compared to last year, but Baz is only 64 starts into his big league career and a few weeks shy of his 27th birthday. Meanwhile, de Brun isn’t even a year removed from graduating high school and has yet to play this season due to a wrist injury. Nobody has a crystal ball, but a year ago at this time, the Rays had a compensatory draft pick and were short a high leverage reliever. Now, they have that high leverage reliever and, in effect, the same draft pick they traded to get him. The whole “Hang Up the Phone When the Rays Call About a Trade” proverb is a tad overused, but in 2026, they’re back to their old hijinks and the trade for Bryan Baker and his weird changeup is a big reason why.
All stats entering May 26, 2026.
