When the Orioles began spring training, Brandon Young was on the radar, but far from the center of it. He was a depth option, a starting pitcher who nearly threw a perfect game in 2025 yet struggled for consistency, as many young pitchers do. He was good to have — although hardly expected to play a prominent role.
As Baltimore enters June, it’s Young, however, who holds the best ERA of anyone in this rotation.
How Young got here — how he became a rotation stabilizer at the exact time the Orioles needed one — has as much to do with his poor outings as his best.
Take his almost-perfect game in Houston last year on one hand and his final outing on the other, when the Astros faced him a second time and tagged him for seven runs. There was a week between those games. Against the same opponent, the results couldn’t have been more different, even though the attack plans were quite similar.
Perhaps that was the issue. This year, meanwhile, Young has established himself with a 3.35 ERA in eight starts. The Orioles have won seven of those games.
And while pitcher wins don’t mean nearly as much as they used to, it is a testament to how Young has grown — when he’s on the bump, the Orioles can expect to be in the game.
“I think that comes with experience and learning up here,” he said. “This is a different game than Triple-A, Double-A. This is a different game. And I think trying to be as consistent as possible, as present as possible, not trying to think about past outings, past pitches, last year, and not getting too ahead of myself definitely helps.”
So does the between-game tinkering that has allowed the 27-year-old to keep advanced scouting reports off base.
Last week, Young cruised in two starts. He went 6 2/3 innings in each of them, combining to allow two earned runs against the Detroit Tigers and Toronto Blue Jays. In the first, he unveiled a new splitter grip that left the Tigers unprepared. In the second, he backed off the splitter slightly and increased his curveball and slider usage.
In keeping those teams off balance, Young played a major role in what was a strong homestand from Baltimore’s rotation. During the Orioles’ 7-3 homestand, their starting pitchers combined to produce 60 innings with 17 earned runs — a 2.55 ERA.
“They’re on a positive trend right now,” assistant pitching coach Mitch Plassmeyer said. “I think the big thing for these guys is to continually be competitive and feed off each other. They’re a pretty tight-knit group. They learn from each other, they’re pretty locked into each other’s outings, and they see how teams approach the guy before them.”
In Young’s case, he and Baltimore’s pitching coaches noticed the way batters were approaching him. The splitter, which he introduced to his arsenal last year, hadn’t played as well to begin this season. In April, opponents hit .500 against it.
The issue may have been how similar it was to his four-seam fastball. Despite a 6-mph difference, on average, between those pitches, pitching coaches Plassmeyer, Drew French and Ryan Klimek wanted there to be even more variance.
Three days before Young’s start against the Tigers, the coaches brought up the idea of changing his splitter grip. They showed him two options, one from Texas Rangers right-hander Nathan Eovaldi and another from Blue Jays right-hander Kevin Gausman.
Young tried Eovaldi’s grip first. It was immediately comfortable. And once he threw it during his midweek bullpen, he decided to implement it immediately.
“I have a pretty good sense or knack for picking up pitches pretty quickly,” he said. “The grip felt comfortable to me. That was the main thing. Can I get it from my set position into my glove comfortably, kind of seamlessly? And then out of the hand, how did it feel? The first couple days throwing it, I had a pretty good feel for it.”
From an average of around 88 mph in April and early May, Young dropped his splitter velocity to around 83 mph. This is the cat-and-mouse game of pitchers and hitters — they adjusted to him; Young changed again.
“He made the adjustment back of trying to kill some velo on it, kill some spin and add some depth, just to be able to get to those locations in a different way,” Plassmeyer said. “It’s paid off for him.”
There have been a series of gambles in Young’s journey here. The first came when he went undrafted out of Louisiana Lafayette in 2020, when the MLB Draft was shortened to five rounds due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He signed with the Orioles and required two Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgeries before he ever reached Triple-A. His rise was choppy because of it, laden with lengthy recoveries, and he never found himself as a highly ranked prospect despite producing steadily in the minors.
Last year, in those 12 starts, his 6.24 ERA is a bit deceiving. It doesn’t illustrate just how dominant he was at times. But the measure of a young pitcher is how he takes those lumps — and with his staff-leading 3.35 ERA this year, Young is proving capable of the most coveted trait of all: adaptability.
“He took a lot of stock in learning from last year’s ups and downs,” Plassmeyer said. “Taking the good ones and identifying what he did well, but taking the ones that weren’t so good and being able to identify how he can clean that up, how he can turn lineups over better, how he needs to execute and how he needs to attack guys.”
His name wasn’t anywhere near the top of Baltimore’s rotation mix during spring training. But as injuries and underperformances piled up, Young has taken his chance.
Comments
Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines.