Kyle Bradish gave the Orioles something close to league-average production in 2026. That was not nearly enough for a team that was banking on much more.
After returning from Tommy John surgery and working through his first full season back, Bradish finished with a 4.12 ERA and a 99 ERA+, which is essentially right at league average for a pitcher. The Orioles had reason to expect a higher ceiling.
Back in March, a season that included 29 starts and a five-year contract extension would have sounded like a big step forward. Instead, the year wound up uneven, and a sports hernia cut it short.
There were reasons to believe the good version of Bradish was still in there. He had already thrown six games at the end of the 2025 season, and the early signs suggested he might pick up where he left off before the surgery.
Hitters weren’t squaring him up, his strikeout rate looked strong, and his walk and home run numbers were in reasonable shape. The Orioles had every right to think they were getting something close to a top-of-the-rotation arm.
That never really materialized over the full season. The strikeout rate fell, the walks climbed, and the home run rate ticked up. His FIP sat at 4.35, which lined up with the broader story: not disastrous, but not what Baltimore needed from a pitcher it had committed to for the long haul.
There was at least one obvious benefit to Bradish staying on the mound as often as he did. He was one of 65 MLB pitchers to reach 150 innings, and by making so many starts before the late-season injury, he helped keep the Orioles away from depth options like Cade Povich. He also mostly avoided pushing the club into even more uncomfortable innings from relievers such as Keegan Akin or Yaramil Hiraldo in the fourth or fifth.
Still, durability alone doesn’t make the season a success. Bradish ranked 47th among those 65 pitchers in innings, and the Orioles didn’t hand him a five-year deal at $18 million per season to get ordinary results.
The warning signs showed up right away. His first start, on March 28 against the Twins, included three walks and ended before he got through five innings.
That outing ended in a loss, and it fit a pattern that kept showing up. Seven starts into the year, Bradish had a 5.03 ERA, had walked 21 batters in 34 innings, and was sitting at 1-4.
Baltimore went 2-5 in those games.
By the end, Bradish was 7-14, and the Orioles were 13-16 in his starts. That was not enough, no matter how you slice it.
The club needed a starter who could tilt games more often than that, and Mike Elias clearly believed Bradish could be part of that answer. He just wasn’t, at least not over the full season.
There were also moments when Craig Albernaz pushed his luck with him in-game. One that stood out came in Cincinnati, where Albernaz let Bradish stay in for one more batter after he had already crossed the 100-pitch mark in the eighth inning. That batter doubled in a run, turning a 2-1 deficit into a 3-1 hole in a game the Orioles eventually lost 3-2.
The encouraging stretch came later. From May 8 through August 15, Bradish delivered a 3.18 ERA across 17 starts. He wasn’t at the same level he had shown before surgery, but that run suggested a better season was still possible if he could hold that form from start to finish.
The late injury may have changed the picture again. The Orioles have not been specific about when Bradish suffered the sports hernia, but it appears his final five starts were affected by it.
Before that stretch, he sat at 3.65 after his August 15 outing. If he had finished there, the conversation around his season would look a lot different.
Even so, the final numbers leave Baltimore hoping for a lot more next year without a ton of certainty behind that hope. The defense behind him matters, too. Bradish was on the mound for 12 of the team’s 88 unearned runs, and that doesn’t even include plays that should have been made but weren’t scored as errors.
At the same time, the underlying numbers point to real concerns. His Statcast page is littered with blue, and blue is bad.
The biggest issue appears to be that his curveball and slider weren’t as sharp as they had been in the past. The fastball, though, does not look like the problem.
He’s still working with the same velocity and nearly the same movement he had before surgery.
That makes next year a major pivot point, especially with the Orioles’ rotation outlook beyond 2026. Trevor Rogers is almost certainly headed to free agency, and finding another pitcher who can match what Rogers gave them in 2025 and from June onward in 2026 will not be easy. That leaves even more on Bradish, Shane Baz, and Brandon Young to deliver at a level they did not sustain over the full season.
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