Veteran starter Zach Eflin is out of options but he had choices.

Other teams besides the Orioles expressed interest in Eflin during his tour of free agency. He was 4 ½ months removed from lower-back surgery and so confident in his recovery that he intended to be available for the first series. He felt good physically and about the negotiations that would lead him to another job.

“I didn’t know where I was going to be,” he said.

Eflin picked the team that traded for him at the 2024 deadline, put him on the injured list three times last season and voiced a desire to re-sign him.

The first preference gave him a second chance.

The deal became official last night - $10 million guaranteed with a mutual option for 2027. He was staying in Baltimore.

“I feel fantastic,” he said this afternoon on a video call. “I’ve been doing some mound work and I think I have my first bullpen scheduled on Jan. 6, so everything’s been going smooth. And as of now my goal is to be ready for Opening Day for the first start of the season.

“It could change. I don’t know. We still have another month and a half to go until I get to spring, but I feel better than I ever have in my life and I’m fully prepared to be ready for that first week of the season.”

A procedure on Aug. 18, termed a lumbar microdiscectomy, became unavoidable. Eflin couldn’t function in a normal manner, and it wasn’t just about his work on the mound. His entire life was impacted by the pain.

“It’s been like a long thing that I’ve dealt with,” he explained. “I originally hurt it probably 10 years ago and throughout my entire career it’s kind of progressively gotten worse, and I never thought it would get to the point where I needed surgery. But pretty much been on the IL every year of my career at some point for my back during the year, and this is the first year that I haven’t been able to manage it. And it came back, which it’s never come back twice in one year. I’ve always been able to manage it and this year I physically couldn’t do it.

“Felt like something was blocking me from being able to just be active, and I think they went in there and found some sort of bone spur that was kind of pushing into my nerve, so that explains a lot. But I’ve never thought surgery really was an option. I had gotten an epidural and figured that was gonna clean everything up and I was gonna pitch right after that, and that wasn’t necessarily the case. So I think the last option was to kind of get it cleaned up. And talking with the surgeon and talking with a lot people who have had it before, they’ve had really good success and have come back stronger and with more mobility and everything.

“So at the stage of my career that I was at and the pain that I was going through, it just kind of made sense to go and clean it up, because it wasn’t gonna be a year-long recovery, 18-month recovery. It was like a four-to-eight month window of, hey, you’re gonna be feeling much, much better. And even out of surgery, obviously sore from being cut open and stuff, but it was a night and day different. I didn’t have that shooting nerve pain, I didn’t feel like someone was holding a lighter to the bottom of my back. And I haven’t had that since right before surgery. So aside from being able to physically play the game of baseball pain-free, just the every day, day-to-day life has been so much better.”

Making only 14 starts and posting a 5.93 ERA, compared to 2.60 in nine outings after the Orioles traded for him, weren’t the most disturbing concessions to the injury.

“It was to a point where I couldn’t necessarily pick up my kids, I couldn’t play with them on the ground,” he said. “I was kind of in a dark spot, and to kind of go through that process, get it cleaned up, get it taken out and to feel like a completely different person, it’s, aside from baseball, just enjoying like the quality of life aspect of it. It’s just been tremendous.”  

The Orioles handed Eflin the ball on Opening Day but envision him working toward the back end of the rotation. He could be an important depth piece or much more.

“Going through back surgery and cutting close to the spine, the first thing I needed to take care of was the quality of life and me being a father and a husband and getting back to being able to be a good dad. Everything else, I felt like, was going to take care of itself as I kind of built up and started to feel better,” he said.

“I thought, ‘I really feel like I’m going to be able to go out healthy and pitch a full season,’ and I think, at that point, everything started to pick up a little bit. I’ve been throwing since early November. But at the end of the day, like I told you guys, I wanted to come back, it wasn’t a secret. And to be able to have an opportunity to come back after kind of everything that I put the organization through is just a tremendous blessing, and I just felt the loyalty kind of speaking to me.

“The last thing I wanted to do was be the guy they traded for and get hurt and not be the guy that they wanted, and that really weighed on me throughout the whole process of getting surgery. Like I missed the last six weeks of the season, I wasn’t around the guys, I was kind of just bedrest, stuck in St. Pete, not really doing anything, kind of in a dark place. But to kind of fast forward to this moment is all worth it, because I feel like I’m going to be fully prepared to go out there and compete with the guys every single day and surround myself with people that want to better each other, and I’ve just been very blessed and thankful.”

The Orioles should get a much improved version of Eflin without the restrictions caused by the spur.

Both sides are counting on it.

“I feel like for the better part of the past two years, I was doing my best to deliver a pitch without hurting my back, which caused me to develop some bad habits,” he said. “I was kind of jumping off my back foot and not using my lower half to drive through the baseball. I was avoiding certain positions throughout my delivery so that I could stay on the field, and I think in that moment, the competitor side was speaking to me more than the physical side. Like, I wanted to be out there, but I physically couldn’t, and there were some outings that maybe I should have said something earlier or maybe I shouldn’t have gone out there at all.

“But it’s like that competitor mindset that I convinced myself that I can deliver a pitch. I can throw the baseball over the plate if I operate in certain mechanics, and I think that kind of just became muscle memory for me, and I developed some really bad habits, like flying open. My arm was lagging a lot, my slot dropped a lot. So I think the coolest thing about this whole process is getting it cleaned up and starting throwing in early in November, I immediately felt my slot kind of back up to where it was, if not higher than it had been in the past.

“The past couple of years I’ve gotten my torque from torquing laterally to kind of avoid rotating on that disc, and I think that’s something I finally figured out now that I’m throwing healthy and I feel good, like I’m actually getting over my front side. I’m using my lower half to kind of kickstart the mechanics, and it’s almost a feeling I’ve never felt before because they took out what was poking in my nerve, and it’s almost, it’s just gone. It’s not there anymore. So there’s no reservation of trying to pitch around it. It’s just my body finally being able to be smooth and deliver a pitch that I’m not worried about hurting anything. It feels natural and normal and I’m excited where I’m at.”

Eflin also could be referring to the Orioles.

The more that Eflin spoke, the more obvious it became how badly he wanted to return. Teammates loved him and the feeling was mutual.

“I think I’ve been around the game long enough to understand most clubhouses,” he said. “I know a guy or two on each team or somebody that’s played for them before or something. But that’s a huge kicker for me. I’m a huge quality of life guy, and I want to better the lives around me just as much as I want them to better my life. So kind of going back to me wanting to come back, you want to surround yourself with good people, and there are good people all over this organization. And it’s kind of a weird time for me.

“I’m coming off an injury, I’m coming off a back surgery. I don’t know which teams are going to be interested, who’s going to want a guy after a spine surgery, or close to a spine surgery. Like, I’ve never been through that process before. But Baltimore was there the whole time and they obviously know my medical records. They’ve been with me through the process of having the back surgery, and just back to the quality of life and the culture aspect, that’s the No. 1 thing for me. And if we can’t all get along, all be on the same page, better ourselves each and every day, what are we really doing?

“To have that familiarity with a team I’ve been with before and I truly love to show up every single day, it’s really all you can ask for, and I’m grateful for the front office to give me another opportunity to be around those guys.”

Eflin also has a chance to reunite with Shane Baz, who arrived in a Dec. 19 trade with the Rays. Eflin joined Tampa Bay in 2023 after Baz underwent ligament-reconstructive surgery on his right elbow.

“Yeah, just knowing him, he’s one of my favorite people in the game of baseball,” Eflin said. “He has such a good personality and he’s such a competitor, he’s a workhorse. The entire time he was rehabbing, he wanted to get back as soon as possible and he wanted to throw the ball pretty much right after surgery. He’s just one of those guys who wants to pitch every fifth day, go as deep in the game and really just be that competitive leader that he is. So I’m extremely excited to actually be able to compete with him, so we can push each other.

“You guys are going to get to know him. He’s fantastic. He’s such a great addition to a really deep team already. And I’m really looking forward to putting on the same jersey as him again.”

Maybe they can compare surgical scars and the recovery process, which was much different for Eflin.

They will make it back to the same rotation but through unrelated journeys.

“It was tough,” Eflin said. “There were some moments. It was pretty much like I couldn't lift, bend or twist for six weeks, so I was kind of just like a stuck piece of two-by-four in bed, standing up. It wasn't very comfortable. It kind of felt like someone would just hit you with a sledgehammer in the bottom of your back every day, but knowing that that was the healing aspect, that was the tissue healing, what was causing the pain was gone.

“So it's hard to remind yourself that it's going to go away, but you're in just such a repetitive funk of waking up feeling bad, going to sleep feeling bad and then slowly, slowly, every day gets better and inch by inch, everything started to feel better. And I think that's when it kind of started turning for me was when I truly didn't feel the pain I felt before. I just felt the pain of the surgery, and I finally was able to kind of separate those and really start to feel good.

“Once I hit the six-week mark, I started bending, twisting, all that stuff and everything felt like it never had before. Because I feel like anything I tried to do in the past, I was always guarding it and it's such a weird injury. In Tampa, I went on the IL for two weeks because I did the overnight feed with my twins. I sat down on a couch and I went to put one of the twins down for bed at one o'clock in the morning and all of a sudden I get up and just like that, just standing up made me miss two weeks of the season. 

“Now that I can do things without guarding or being nervous of re-hurting it, it's opened a whole other world for me. I feel, honestly, like a little kid again, and I'm so thankful for that because it is such a mental grind with a back disc injury. So obviously thankful to the surgeon who did a great job and I'm just really happy with where I'm at.”