All offseason, the talk around the Baltimore Orioles has been their need to acquire an ace. After failing to lock down Corbin Burnes, the Orioles’ blossoming core of young hitters faces an uphill battle without similar support on the pitching front. That is, if there isn’t already an ace on the squad. Sure, an extra elite pitcher would come in handy, but the baseball world has acted as if there’s no talent taking the mound in Baltimore.
Grayson Rodriguez has a ceiling of that ace Baltimore desperately craves, and it seems to be forgotten in the “doomerism” about a failed offseason before the slugfest of the AL East begins. The right-hander was 2022’s consensus top pitching prospect, with publications such as Baseball America giving him a 70-grade potential. His first two seasons have been rocky — year one was marred by struggles and year two was plagued by injury — but the potential is still immense. We saw legitimate pitch mix changes in 2023 and injuries in 2024, meaning a clean 2025 could be Rodriguez’s ascendancy to stardom.
On paper, Rodriguez looks great: good release point, strong fastball, and sufficient secondaries. A 3.86 ERA and 26.5% strikeout rate is as much as anyone should be asking for from a 24-year-old pitcher. However, it still looks like there’s more in the tank for Rodriguez, and he needs to build off of 2024 to take a step forward.
What the Arsenal Looked Like in 2024
Rodriguez has a strong foundation before the ball even leaves his hand, with his mechanics allowing his release point to be in an optimal location. While standing at 6’5″, Rodriguez works his way down the mound better than just about anyone. He gets 7.3 feet of extension, which is in the 98th percentile for starting pitchers, putting him around the likes of Bailey Ober and Zack Wheeler. A standard three-quarters arm slot allows Rodriguez to get a low 5.6-feet release height despite being an imposing figure on the mound.
Most importantly, this release point is significant for his fastball. The pitch comes in at 96 mph with average ride and above-average run for his arm slot. Altogether, the pitch grades out well with a 107 Stuff+, 11th-best among starters last year (min. 50 innings). Rodriguez locates the pitch in the upper third of the zone 63% of the time, creating an exceptional 1.2 inches of height-adjusted VAA (78th percentile). The peripheral stats look serviceable; a 29.9% CSW% and 53.9% Str-ICR are above average for a starter’s fastball, but the results are drastically different.
Despite strong pitch characteristics, hitters had a .291 average and a .413 xSLG on the fastball, meaning it gave up hits but was good at preventing significant damage. While an “unlucky” .373 BABIP could drive this, this is two years in a row of horrendous BABIP. 2024 was a step up from 2023’s absurd .430 BABIP, but Rodriguez’s fastball struggles significantly when it isn’t located perfectly. Looking at his locations and wOBA vs. right-handed hitters, there’s a tiny window for success.
When the fastball touches the middle third of the zone or lower, righties are just teeing off on the fastball. Especially early in the count, the pitch has enough run to act like a two-seamer but expected vertical movement, which allows hitters to make contact five percent more frequently.
Against left-handed hitters, Rodriguez sees considerably more success, as they only hit .200 with a .298 xSLG. He’s able to locate his fastball in the shadow area of the zone much more frequently and limits damage on pitches inside the zone.
Rodriguez has a 17.0% swinging-strike rate against lefties, nearly double that against righties, making his fastball an actual reverse-platoon pitch. This is because his main secondary pitch is his changeup, which is effective for both types of hitters.
Even though his fastball has a subpar movement profile on its own, Rodriguez’s fastball/changeup combo might be the best in baseball. Both pitches have 12 inches of horizontal movement with a 14-inch difference in vertical movement and a 12 mph difference in velocity. Among all starters in 2024, no one other than Rodriguez and Spencer Schwellenbach had a 90th percentile difference between velocity and vertical movement of their fastball and primary offspeed pitch (Schwellenbach throws a splitter). Including the similarities of horizontal movement, no one creates separation like Rodriguez.
The result is a 113 Stuff+ changeup that can limit hard contact and get whiffs just about anywhere on the plate.
For all of the BABIP misfortunes for Rodriguez’s fastball, the changeup had a pristine .211 BABIP in 2024. He only goes to the pitch 21% of the time, with most changeups being early in the count to left-handed hitters and late in the count to right-handed hitters.
While Rodriguez has the changeup as his bread-and-butter secondary, he also has two breaking pitches that are essential to success.
His slider, which scouts graded as a future 70-value pitch, took a significant step forward in 2024 as he transitioned from a sweeper to a more bullet slider. He bumped the pitch from 82 mph to 86 mph, taking off horizontal movement and adding a slight drop. The 2024 slider graded out as a 108 Stuff+, a solid but unremarkable figure. However, Rodriguez commanded the smaller movement profile better, which increased strike rates and whiff rates on the pitch.
The only tradeoff Rodriguez made with the harder slider was that it was a pitch hitters could do some damage with. Since he had more command, Rodriguez attempted to use it more frequently in all sorts of counts when he needed a strike but got into trouble giving up five homers. All but one were in either 0-0 or 0-1 counts.
This is almost exclusively a pitch for right-handed hitters, as he throws it 25% of the time to right-handed batters, making it his main secondary to righties, and only 2% to lefties.
On the other hand, the curveball is mainly deployed to left-handed batters (22% usage) but is still used against right-handed batters (9% usage). The curveball also saw a shape tweak last year, as it lost three inches of drop and an inch of break while gaining about one mph to 81. Rodriguez primarily uses the pitch for called strikes, but he has erratic command of the pitch thus making it unreliable for whiffs late in at-bats.
He almost doubled the usage of the pitch last season, while only seeing a three percent decrease in called strike rate. It’s an effective yet unspectacular tool in the arsenal, though it did run into damage the third time through the order.
How Does He Take the Leap in 2025
Overall, Rodriguez needs to build an approach around considerably fewer fastballs. Even though it’s a good pitch, hitters have the most success against it, and it is not elite enough to warrant 48% usage. It’s okay to rely on the fastball early, but Rodriguez had a 6.11 ERA in the third time through the order (TTO) while throwing fastballs 42.7% of the time. Additionally, the curveball gets crushed later in games too, as hitters are also sitting on it while Rodriguez attempts to steal a strike with the pitch.
Going primarily to sliders and changeups, his best pitches for missing bats, can allow Rodriguez to keep hitters off balance, and he can deploy the fastball when necessary.
The other way that Rodriguez can prolong his outings and prevent contact from getting away from him is to bring back his cutter. He threw a cutter in 2023 that struggled mightily: it had a 5.8% swinging-strike rate, .315 AVG, and .724 xSLG. His performance improved substantially once he cut the pitch out of his arsenal in 2023, but it’s an essential tool for him to help mitigate hard contact.
Cutters are a platoon-neutral pitch, meaning they work for all hitters, and are good for preventing hard contact because they have enough velocity to look like a fastball but move enough to escape the barrel. The problem with Rodriguez’s 2023 cutter was that it was too far off the fastball and wasn’t tricking hitters.
There was a 7.5 mph difference between the fastball and cutter, which was in the seventh percentile for differences between a pitcher’s primary fastball and their cutter. If he could bring back the cutter and up its velocity to the 92-94 mph mark, which is around average, it would make the pitch far more enticing for hitters. It also completes Rodriguez’s bands of velocity for all of his pitches.
With a full plate of movement types and velocities, this challenge hitters with almost everything. Rodriguez has already flashed ace potential and can consistently miss bats while limiting walks. However, taking a step forward in optimizing his arsenal could give the Orioles the number-one pitcher they are craving.