Patrick Reilly’s 25th birthday came with a little more meaning than most. The Orioles right-hander celebrated with his dad, Mike, in town, a steak dinner on Wednesday night, and then a sharp debut for Peoria in the Arizona Fall League the next day.
Reilly made the most of the occasion at Camelback Ranch, striking out six over three innings of one-run ball as the Javelinas rolled to a 10-2 win over Glendale. He punched out Top 100 prospects Eduardo Quintero (LAD No.
2 / MLB No. 15) and Caleb Bonemer (CWS No. 2 / MLB No. 27), and the damage against him was minimal: of the six balls put in play, only one was classified as hard-hit, meaning it came off the bat at more than 95 mph.
The stuff was loud, too. Reilly’s four-seam fastball sat at 96.2 mph and got up to 97.7, while also producing an average of 18 inches of induced vertical break. His slider was the real separator, drawing whiffs on seven of 12 swings.
For Reilly, this is a return to the mound after a long reset. The Orioles got him at the 2024 Trade Deadline in a one-for-one deal for Billy Cook, and after pitching mostly out of the bullpen at Vanderbilt and in his first pro look in Pittsburgh’s system, he was stretched out as a starter once the trade was made. Then came the elbow issue: after only three appearances in 2025, he had Tommy John surgery in mid-May and spent more than a year facing the reality of lost development time.
That stretch changed his outlook.
“It's not as big of a deal as we make it,” said Reilly. “Pitching is fun, competition's fun. Sometimes you can get lost in that, and having that time -- a year-plus -- to look at all that in the grand scheme of things coming back, I'm just trying to have as much fun as I can.”
Reilly began the 2025 season as the Orioles’ No. 10 prospect, but he recently fell off the club’s Top 30 list as the organization added more talent through the Draft and Trade Deadline and as questions lingered about how his stuff would look after surgery.
The Fall League gives him a chance to pile up innings he missed. Since returning in late June, he has logged only 53 regular-season frames across three levels, and the goal now is to keep sharpening a power arsenal that has been part of his game since his Vanderbilt days while continuing to tighten his command.
“I think that was one of the bigger things I wanted to work on, knowing I had time down and building from the ground up with the legs and with the arm, how everything's moving,” Reilly said. “I'm very lucky, fortunate, and I put in a lot of work to make sure that it's actually one of the first things that came back.”
He finished the regular season back at Double-A Chesapeake, where he made eight starts for one of the Minors’ most dominant rotations. That group included Anthony Eyanson (BAL No.
2 / MLB No. 45), Joseph Dzierwa (BAL No.
3 / MLB No. 69) and Caden Hunter (BAL No. 4 / MLB No.
92). Reilly was especially effective late, posting a 2.08 ERA with a 41/11 K/BB ratio over his final six outings, and he said some of that comfort came from working with college teammate Dom Keegan, who caught all of those starts.
“Me for the first time in pro ball being an older guy, it was fun to watch them and kind of bust their chops a little bit about being the young guys,” Reilly said. “In the clubhouse, we're playing ping-pong together, we're playing video games together, we're always competing and laughing and we're always having a good time.
But they're all good and they all do things so differently. It's so fun to watch them.”
Peoria’s victory also featured big nights from other Orioles prospects. Vance Honeycutt and Ike Irish (BAL No.
5 / MLB No. 95), the club’s first-round picks in 2024 and 2025, each hit their second Fall League homer, while infielder Brandon Butterworth added a grand slam. Through the first week in the desert, all three are sitting on an OPS north of 1.000.
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