Orioles' manager Brandon Hyde dropped some nuggets of information on his ballclub pregame Thursday in Fort Myers, Fla. Before the Orioles played the Red Sox, he announced the order of the starting rotation to begin the year and told reporters that Jorge Mateo would make the Opening Day roster.

We already knew that new ace Corbin Burnes would start the opener on March 28. But Hyde said he would be followed in order by Grayson Rodriguez, Tyler Wells, Dean Kremer and Cole Irvin.

With an off day on the second day of the season, the Orioles could have brought Burnes back for the fifth game of the year. Now he is set to start Game 6 after the first turn through the rotation.

Some are already speculating that Mateo's roster inclusion will make it harder for Jackson Holliday to make it. I don't see it that way just yet. But I guess yes if Ramon Urias makes the roster and there are no injuries or trades, it potentially could be more challenging.

I still see the kid on the roster for the opener.

For now, we have to put on hold any talk that this might be among the best O’s rotations ever. They added a stud pitcher in 2021 National League Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes, but on the first day of spring training we saw that injuries subtracted, at least for some period of time, two starters.

We’ve seen better days in Birdland.

Right-hander Kyle Bradish, who was fourth in American League Cy Young voting last year when he had a 2.83 ERA, is expected to start the new season on the injured list with a UCL sprain in his right elbow. He had a PRP injection. Now Birdland waits nervously with hope that eradicates the problem and it doesn’t get more serious later.

That news comes alongside the information that left-hander John Means is about a month behind the other pitchers. His winter of throwing moved slower than expected due to his elbow soreness that caused him to miss the playoffs. That followed his Tommy John surgery of April 2022. He has thrown just 31 2/3 big league innings the last two seasons. He was confident of pitching a full load of innings when interviewed during Birdland Caravan, but now he is likely to miss Opening Day.

The 2023 AL Rookie of the Year, Gunnar Henderson, experienced some mild oblique aggravation about two weeks ago while working out at home. At least he is expected to be ready for Opening Day.

The next story posted here will have a Sarasota dateline.

Get used to it.

Orioles pitchers and catchers report today, with the first workout unfolding on Thursday, coinciding with the beginning of media access. Players will take their physicals and hit the fields. The sounds of baseball will puncture the silence.

Bring on the suspense.

The start button will be pressed for the march toward another division title and much deeper dive into the playoffs. To be one-and-done again will be unacceptable. To simply contend will be setting goals way too low.

Now that they have added the 2021 National League Cy Young award winner, right-hander Corbin Burnes, just how good is the Orioles rotation? Does it stack up among the top groups in the American League?

A discussion of this on MLB Network this week led the analysts to ponder that question and believe the answer is likely yes.

They listed a graphic of “notable 2024 projected rotations" in the American League, listing in no particular order, Seattle, Baltimore, New York, Houston and Toronto.

Here are the pitchers projected to be in all five:

Seattle: Luis Castillo, George Kirby, Logan Gilbert, Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo

Outside of the excitement over the weekend of Birdland Caravan, the new ownership group news and getting an ace pitcher, anything else going on around Birdland lately?

The Orioles rotation, which was pretty good most of last year and very good in the second half, just got better for the 2024 season. Last October, it was the Rangers who had Nathan Eovaldi as a difference maker. The O’s hope Corbin Burnes could be that guy this October.

You don’t see legit aces traded very often, but Milwaukee pulled the trigger on a move that hurt them in ’24 but may be big for their future as they add lefty DL Hall and infielder Joey Ortiz. They also got the No. 34 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft.

The O’s added a true No. 1 pitcher and now their top four in the rotation features two pitchers that have finished in the top four at least once for the Cy Young voting, another that has made an All-Star team – giving them two All-Stars in the rotation – plus a young stud that was once the No. 1 pitching prospect in baseball.

How do we like it? Let’s count some ways.

Left-handers Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery remain on the free-agent market but are viewed as too pricey for the Orioles. The contract length and dollars don’t work for them.

The club is linked to Marcus Stromen in various reports, whether due to serious or surface interest. Could be ongoing talks or tire kicking.

Could be an attempt to stick another team into the conversation besides the Yankees.

A recent article on this site spurred a discussion over a No. 1 starter and whether anyone should slot ahead of Kyle Bradish. And more specific, in comparison to the White Sox’s Dylan Cease if the Orioles managed to acquire him in a trade.

Cease was 14-8 with a 2.20 ERA and 1.109 WHIP in 32 starts in 2022 and finished second in American League Cy Young voting. Bradish was 4-7 with a 4.90 ERA and 1.402 WHIP in 23 starts as a rookie.

There are a lot of questions to be answered for the Orioles between now and Opening Day 2024 on March 28 versus the Los Angeles Angels.

The makeup of the pitching staff and starting rotation is a big one.

If the Orioles add a starter who could slot into the top half of their rotation – something they have said they seek – it will be getting pretty crowded in that starting five.

There are already the quartet of Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, John Means and Dean Kremer who could easily take four of the five slots. A new addition could grab the last spot.

So where does that leave everybody else, including lefty DL Hall, once one of baseball’s top pitching prospects and right-hander Tyler Wells, a pitcher who had a 3.18 ERA as a starter at the 2023 All-Star break? And a pitcher who on the last day of the first-half led MLB in WHIP at 0.90.

The Cardinals signing of Kyle Gibson to a one-year, $12 million deal with an option didn’t shed much light on the Orioles’ plans for their rotation.

Those intentions already are illuminated.

Executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias wants an upper-level starter for the rotation. Gibson is a great guy who put up some good numbers in 2023, but Elias is aiming higher.

He won’t find a higher-quality individual, but this is about upgrading the rotation.

Elias gave interviews at the general managers meetings and to MASNsports.com and 105.7 The Fan over the last few weeks, and it’s the same summary. He wants pitching. Near or at the top of the rotation and in the back end of the bullpen.

The question of do the Orioles more need a starting pitcher or a reliever may well be asked but isn’t the answer probably “both.” And can’t they get both?

Not only can they, they probably will. They surely can multi-task and it’s very unlikely that any one addition will keep them from making another. Even in the same spot on the roster, that spot being the pitching staff.

What is their biggest need is subjective to all of us pondering the question and whatever we come up with may or may not match the team’s thinking and that is the one that counts the most.

And unless they make a major expenditure here and sign someone to a larger than expected contract, adding someone as a starter or reliever is not likely to impact the addition of the other.

When it comes to the market, how that plays out may also determine in what order the Orioles proceed here. It takes two to tango and sometimes players and their agents want to wait to see others sign before as they say, “setting the market.”

The World Series begins Friday night in Arlington, Texas, with the Rangers facing the Diamondbacks. The way nobody expected it.

I didn’t perform an exhaustive search, but I’m confident in saying industry-wide projections back in March didn’t include this pairing. But teams get hot at the right time, and they burn a path to the Fall Classic.

They also scorch the doubters, and the list of names was miles long.

Jordan Montgomery would have been a nice fit with the Orioles, but the Cardinals traded him to the Rangers around the deadline, along with reliever Chris Stratton, for left-hander John King and two top 30 prospects in pitcher Tekoah Roby and infielder Thomas Saggese.

The Orioles have the No. 1 ranked farm system in baseball. They won’t outspend teams but can out-prospect them.

A few stats, thoughts and opinions as the first-place Orioles, a team that has not lost an AL East series since April 9, gets ready to host third-place Toronto tonight. For the O’s it is the start of a nine-game homestand against the Jays, Rockies and White Sox.

* The O’s pitching has been pretty darn good for well over 40 games now. After allowing just one run on Sunday, the O’s team ERA is 3.62 since July 1. And they are 29-15 (.659) in 44 games in that time.

As of Sunday, that was the fourth-best ERA in the AL in that stretch and sixth-best in MLB. And the O’s starters had thrown the third-most innings of any team in that span.

So yeah, pretty good.

And while the team ERA for the year is 4.08 to rank eighth in the AL, it’s much better in this span of games which is over a month and not just a good series or a good few weeks. It’s the kind of pitching they would probably need to win October games and the kind they got in the last two games at Seattle where they beat a hot team 1-0 and 5-3 back-to-back in ten innings.

With the trade deadline set for next Tuesday, the Orioles are no doubt checking in on the pitching market. For what it is worth, the pitching staff may be in better shape than some think and yet as they say, you can never have enough pitching.

But for a team that plays .750 ball this year when it gets a quality start, it has been happening with much greater frequency since early June for the Orioles.

In the team’s first 62 games this year, the Orioles got a quality start just 29.0 percent of the time, going 18-for-62 with a rotation ERA of 4.86 in the 62 games.

In the last 40 games, even after Kyle Bradish allowed five runs Wednesday, the Orioles have gotten a QS 55.0 percent, going 22-for-40 with a rotation ERA of 4.02.

It is a nice trend up and again the Orioles are 30-10 this year in their 40 quality starts. Where once the O’s were in the bottom third of the AL in quality starts, now just five teams have more.

A couple of quick thoughts as the Orioles hit the home stretch of spring training. They have seven spring games remaining over the next seven days and this time next week the spring games will be over.

I have no stats to compare this to past years, but the O’s spring roster for their game versus Philadelphia on Monday was at 51 with 36 from the 40-man and 15 non-roster invitees still officially on the camp roster. That seems like a lot on the roster this late in camp. The Orioles last made spring roster cuts last Tuesday after their game in Bradenton versus the Pirates. (And they did make some cuts late Monday afternoon).

It is interesting that this late in camp, three young prospects, there via non-roster invites, are all still officially on the roster and I speak of Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser and Heston Kjerstad.

All have been impressive in this camp and all three could impact the O’s roster during the 2023 season. None is likely to be there on Opening Day but the fact the club has kept them around so long I think shows us how they feel about this group of three and that they realize all three could be back later in the year.

Kjerstad has been hitting the entire camp. On Feb. 25, in the first spring game, he homered twice at Ed Smith Stadium just missing a third homer. He went 3-for-3 and now he is 4-for-9 with a homer his last three games. He just keeps hitting the ball hard and with authority.

Though there’s been a bit of movement on the free agent market elsewhere, we’re still in the preliminary stages of the offseason around here. The Nationals have yet to add anybody to the fold, focusing instead on which players to add to their 40-man roster and which players to remove from the equation.

But now that they’ve completed those tasks, it’s fair to wonder when they’ll start moving onto free agency and addressing a handful of significant needs. (It’s also fair to wonder if they’ll be able to address any of those needs while the club is still for sale, but we’ve already raised that question and there’s not much more to say about that for now.)

So let’s proceed as if Mark Lerner has given Mike Rizzo the green light to spend some money this winter. Not gobs of money, but enough money to fill roster holes with actual free agents, not just bargain-basement pickups.

The Nationals have multiple needs. We’ll focus today on a particularly important one: starting pitching.

The 2022 rotation ranked dead-last in the majors in ERA (5.97) by a longshot, last in WHIP (1.563), last in walks per nine innings (3.76), last in strikeouts per walk (1.97), last in homers allowed (161). It’s hard to believe they finished with the majors’ worst record as well, isn’t it?

CHICAGO – There’s plenty for Davey Martinez to be concerned about these days, amid a five-game losing streak that has seen his Nationals get blown out multiple times, all while fielding a roster that looks nothing like the one he was used to only a year ago.

But nothing stands out more to Martinez right now, and rightfully so, than a rotation that hasn’t come close to holding its own during this stretch.

Entering tonight’s series opener against the Cubs, Nationals starters have averaged a scant 3.3 innings over the last five games. They haven’t had anybody complete five innings since Cory Abbott tossed five scoreless frames Aug. 2 against the Mets, hours after Juan Soto and Josh Bell were traded to the Padres.

The domino effect on the bullpen has been dramatic, with several relievers unavailable on a given night because they pitched too much the previous one.

“It’s been tough,” Martinez said. “Trying to space these guys out, trying not to use them too much. Keeping guys fresh as much as we can. Hopefully today, Aníbal’s pitching and he can give us a good 5-6 innings and then we can go from there.”

Davey Martinez’s last season as a big league player came in 2001, when he hit .287 for the Braves. Atlanta’s rotation, the backbone of a team that won 88 games to capture a division title, averaged 6.2 innings per start, tops in the National League. Even the worst rotation in the league that year, the Reds, averaged 5.4 innings per start.

On Tuesday night, Martinez watched Joan Adon become the first member of the Nationals rotation to complete six innings this season, then even record an out in the seventh before he was pulled. Not that they were alone in that regard: Ten other major league clubs had yet to get a six-inning start in 2022 as of Tuesday.

“The game has definitely changed,” Martinez said. “I look around at what’s going around the league. There’s only been like 10 or 11 games where starters have gone six innings. For someone that’s been doing this for three decades, the game has changed a lot.”

There are valid reasons for this. The condensed, three-week spring training is chief among them. Pitchers simply didn’t have the usual amount of time to build their arms up like they would during a camp that normally would’ve been twice as long.

But this is also a reflection of Major League Baseball in 2022, where length from starters simply isn’t viewed as the priority it once was. With teams having seen the data on starters facing a lineup three times a night, and with most bullpens featuring a bounty of big arms, front offices and field managers simply don’t believe it’s prudent to push most starters the way they used to.