Brandon Young Is The Orioles Second-Best Starter. And Is Quite Likely To Remain As Much

Brandon Young is the Baltimore Orioles second-best starting pitcher, and I suspect he remains that for the duration of this season.

Kyle Bradish is the staff ace, with the best stuff and the best resume, and he’s been great after a slow start (not unexpected given he’s had three seasons impacted by a Tommy John surgery). Bradish is their best starting pitcher, and that is not up for debate. And Young is their second best, no matter how many resources bewildered baseball czar Mike Elias gave up to get Trevor Rogers and Shane Baz in trade and how much he’s overpaying injured-and-aged Chris Bassitt ($18M and already on the IL).

Young, 27, has presented himself with more confidence and put together a run of four straight starts with much improved command. He's only been shelled once in 10 starts (by an Astros team that’s seen quite a bit of him.) And while he isn’t going to overwhelm anyone with his velocity, and he will surrender hard contact (an apparent requisite to be on an Elias staff), he is using multiple pitches to cull a preponderance of ground balls, a must if you don’t have swing-and-miss stuff.

And Young (an un-drafted signee in 2020) also has command of something no one else on this staff save for Bradish does – a fastball that is giving the league fits and allowing him to pitch off of it, and not around (see: Baz, Rogers, etc.). I’m not projecting greatness for Young, and the more he’s seen over time, perhaps problems will arise. But I’d be surprised at this point if he’s not at least a slightly above league average starter in 2026, able to stack six or seven innings with some regularity, an accomplishment in these parts.

“He’s been outstanding, tonight was awesome,” rookie skipper Craig Albernaz said after Young shut Seattle down for seven innings, allowing just two hits and walking just two batters to lower his ERA to 3.04. “Attacking the strike zone. The split was real again. That pitch is a great equalizer for him. And just the way he throws strikes.”

The splitter is keying all the ground balls and Young is also getting more effective sprinkling in a slider as well; Mariners batters swung seven times at the slider – a weapon he saves for righties – and missed six times.

Keep It On The Low

Young got 12 ground ball outs against the Mariners, to just one flyout. That’s a ridiculous ratio that won’t be maintained, but things have trended that way for four straight starts and that’s imperative, given the loud contract he tends to surrender, and mostly muted strikeout numbers (again, the norm for the entire staff). Over his last four starts Young has recorded 36 ground ball outs and 37 flyouts – if only more of his compadres on the staff were doing that.

His ability to toggle two fastballs with different contours is vital, too. Young used four-seam fastball, which is clearly hoppy with late life, 40 percent of the time in this start despite getting just one whiff with it on 16 swings, and came away unscathed. And the two-seamer has natural sinking action that keeps the ball down.

Young now has four straight starts walking two or less and has allowed two earned runs or less in five of his last six outings. He’s allowed more than three earned runs just once this season (the loss to the Astros). Again, his hit totals will be high, because the whiff totals are low, but curtailing walks means the homers he does surrender tend to not hurt as much.

Perhaps most staggering of all, especially for this rotation, Young has pitched into the seventh inning four straight times, and despite that volume of work the league is batting just .134 off his fastball and slugging just .284 off of it.

He won’t be receiving Cy Young votes like Bradish once did, and there will be rockier times ahead. But almost no one thought he’d even be in this rotation when Elias was crowing about all the middling pitching additions he’d made and their renewed pitching depth.

Young won’t be falling out of this rotation or headed back to Norfolk and I suspect he remains the second-best of a very tepid bunch at least for this season. Given how utterly inept Elias has been at developing any starting pitching eight years into his perpetual rebuild, that would be a major step forward for this front office.

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