Bradish for Bundy becomes a winner for Orioles

SAN FRANCISCO – Kyle Bradish had designed the perfect plan. A trip to Hawaii and a marriage proposal to girlfriend Mollie Mae. The hours they’d spend relaxing on the beach, the ideal escape from life as a low-minors pitcher, and in such a romantic setting.

That is, until he saw a missed call from Angels farm director Mike LaCassa one day after slipping the ring on Mollie’s finger. The organization’s pitching coordinator tracked him down and suggested that he contact LaCassa right away. Bradish had been traded to the Orioles with three other minor leaguer pitchers for Dylan Bundy.

This wasn't part of the itinerary. 

“We were headed to the beach, had to drive back to the place we were staying,” Bradish said last week. “I forgot who called me here with the Orioles. I don’t remember if it was Mike (Elias) or somebody else. That’s kind of all I remember about it.”

A world turned upside down can scramble the mind.

Elias, just one year into his job as executive vice president/general manager, spoke to Bradish first. Chris Holt, former director of pitching, was among the others who reached out.

The four-for-one deal consummated on Dec. 4, 2019 eventually became a one-for-one that still worked in the club’s favor by a wide margin.

Bundy, the fourth pick in the 2011 draft with the triple-digit fastball in high school, did well in his 11 starts in the pandemic 2020 season before injuries caught up to him. He spent one more season with the Angels, posting a 6.06 ERA in 23 games, and bounced from the Twins to the Mets to retirement and a new career as a realtor in his home state of Oklahoma. His last major league season was in 2022.

Bundy underwent Tommy John surgery in 2013 while ranked as baseball’s No. 2 prospect. The platelet-rich plasma injection wasn’t a cure for the partial ligament tear. Sound familiar?

Bradish, a fourth-round draft pick out of New Mexico State in 2018, received the injection last January and had surgery five months later, but he returned last week, struck out 10 batters in six innings and looked a lot like the pitcher who finished fourth in Cy Young voting in his last full season. He starts again tonight in San Diego.

He came to the Orioles because they were in a rebuild and Bundy didn’t fit in it. Elias had to make some unpopular decisions and keep tearing down, and Bundy was one of his most attractive chips, though with declining value.

“My memory of it is, as soon as I got in the job end of 2018, I had a lot of pings on Bundy, and we just ended up keeping him and hoping he’d have a better year in ’19,” Elias said. “And then at the ’19 deadline we didn’t have a ton of strong offers for him. It was pretty mild. So we kept him at that deadline. And then in the winter of 2019, we really had two teams that agreed to include what we felt like was a strong headliner and one of them was the Angels. I won’t say what the other one was. But we had the trade paths that we were working on and we were comparing the Angels package, which we felt was led by Bradish, with the other package.

“Bradish wasn’t ranked really highly at the time, but I was real familiar with him from the 2018 draft in Houston and he threw like 100 innings in the (California) League and did pretty well the year before, which is a tough thing to do right out of college. Our pro scouting, Mike Snyder, was real high on him, and we had Chris Holt look at him and evaluate him, too, and both of them were big fans. We thought he was underrated, and I think we had a higher opinion of him than the Angels did. Maybe we had him rated higher and that was why they were willing to include him. I don’t know.”

A choice had to be made between the Angels and the unnamed club. Holt and Snyder, director of pro scouting, offered strong endorsements of Bradish. Domestic scouting supervisor Brad Ciolek also was involved.

“We really liked him, and we were trying to decide, are we going to go the Angels or the other team, and Mike and Chris Holt talked, and the other package was a pitching prospect, too, and those guys were like, ‘We like Bradish,’” Elias recalled. “So then, we tried to build out the package a little bit, have some extra arms in there, but Bradish was the main piece, even though he was like a 20^th prospect or something at the time.”

Minor league pitchers Isaac Mattson, Zack Peek and Kyle Brnovich came with Bradish, the only ranked prospect by MLB Pipeline at No. 21, and they are no longer in the organization. Brnovich was released earlier this summer. The Brewers selected Peek in the Triple-A phase of the 2024 Rule 5 draft. Mattson was released in July 2022, pitched in the independent Atlantic League in 2023, signed with the Twins and has a 1.95 ERA this summer in 34 appearances with the Pirates.

“I was just rehabbing in Triple-A with Brno before he got released,” Bradish said. “I still talk to Peek and Mattson every so often. We keep in touch.”

Elias said one of the “driving factors” behind wanting Bradish was the starter’s pitch mix that would expand later.

“He didn’t have the two-seamer yet, but there was the four-seamer, the nasty curveball, the nasty slider,” Elias said. “The changeup had a lot of work to do. I think Holt in particular liked how he had weapons for both bat sides. The breaking balls were plus pitches back in A ball. And I think his command got better in our system. His changeup got a little better, and he added that two-seamer, which was a game changer.

“But from the minute we got him, first phone call once we traded for him, we could just tell this guy’s got a winning attitude and a work ethic and an understanding of who he is and what he needs to do to get better.”

Bradish said he was in shock initially but felt differently after talking it over with his fiancée.

“You know it happens but you don’t think it’s gonna happen to you, and then once we sat down and actually processed everything, we thought that it was a really good opportunity to come in here and kind of be a guy for the O’s,” Bradish said.

“I know a lot of people think like, the team that’s trading you away, they didn’t want you. I took it as that the Orioles wanted me, so I thought it was a good opportunity to go in, have a fresh start and come into a good situation here.”

Hitting big on one out of four pitchers counts as a win for the Orioles. They’ll never regret their decision or question the process.

“I can’t say we were shocked. I think it would have been a bonus if any of those guys had made any kind of impact. The trade was really about Bradish,” Elias said.

“Usually when you do a trade, even if you get a headliner that you like, especially for a pitcher -Bundy had, what, two years of control left or something - you’re usually able to get a little bit of a package. But we usually try to make it about the headliner.”

Bradish is the featured performer again tonight as the Orioles open their three-game series against the Padres. He won't attract the same ovations away from home. Similar results will suffice. 

“I thought he looked spectacular,” Elias said. “Obviously, it’s not like he’s got to do that every time. I imagine there are going to be speed bumps, so I don’t want to set expectations that he’s got to punch out 11 guys every time the rest of 2025.

“I wish we had won the game, but it was a super happy moment for everybody. We’ve had so many injuries and some rehabs that have not come to fruition. Just to get him back looking exactly like himself was great. And the pitching coaches had the utmost confidence that he was gonna pitch really well in that game, just knowing him. So they were right.”