Can Brandon Young Pick Up Where He Left Off For 2027 Orioles? We Have A Good Idea

Brandon Young passed our sniff test early on in the 2026 season.

He was commanding his fastball and multiple pitches when recalled to Baltimore as older starters who were always going to break down started to break down, and he didn’t seem nearly as out-of-his-element as he was at times after his initial call-up in 2025 and the league wasn’t smashing his fastball at a time when many Orioles starters seemed scared to throw theirs. Young was throwing two with relative abandon when most of his teammates in the rotation didn't want to throw one.

We told you he was going to have a season that far surpassed expectations, and we told you he was going to end up with one of the top one or two ERAs among everyone in this rotation and we were right. So what does this portend for the future? Can we rightfully just expect that Young picks up where he left off and he could end up having the top statistical season of any of their 2027 starters?

Well, no.

For a multitude of reasons. Including the fact this team must get series and add a big-time lefty starter to the current mix, and also add another veteran starter in free agency beyond that southpaw. But there are reasons to believe that Young can be a solid contributor to this rotation for years to come and provide significant value and pick up, say, where Dean Kremer left off, but with less extreme variance, misplaced cockiness and without being so vulnerable early in games and early in the season.

Job Well Done

Let’s quantify what Young, a former un-drafted free agent, accomplished in his first full season in MLB. He led the team’s starter with a 3.56 ERA and it wasn’t even close. Runaway champ there. He managed to surpass 150 innings pitched despite never going above 110 IP in the minors.

He is, unquestionably, Mike Elias’s biggest pitching success story in his near eight seasons in charge – he is also arguably Elias’s singular homegrown starter success story. A bad Orioles team was 19-9 in his 28 starts, him making 28 starts is an accomplishment, and he only allowed more than three earned runs on five occasions and only once did it happen more than once in the same month.

What The Future Holds

Alas, Young isn’t sneaking up on anyone next season. In a real organization that was actually trying to compete, he’d be the fourth/fifth starter with the pressure off. But we know The Elias Way and the frauds who own this team and manage this roster, so it might not be set up that way in 2027.

But there are two primary reasons I believe he will stay in this rotation.

He was in the top 78 percentile in fastball run value. You can dabble with new pitches and we know the O’s think they are smart with the slider emphasis, and then the sweeper emphasis, and you can always try to add to your arsenal. But if you can’t win with your fastball those other offerings better be best of breed.

The league hit just .225 and slugged just .381 off the four-seam fastball and Young threw it a lot – over 40 percent of the time.

And it helped him get hitters to expand the zone, which also gives me hope this wasn’t just a blip. Young was in the 81st percentile in chase rate, which is reason to believe the swing-and-miss numbers will increase as he gets even more accustomed to big league life.

Now, allowing 150 hits to just 133 strikeouts in 156 IP … that’s why projecting anything more than a stable back-end guy is silly. The slider became a real weapon for Young, but he really rides the four-seam vs. split action (that’s over 60% of all pitches thrown right there), and unless something else pops for him to trust, you can reasonably expect him to continue battling enough to make 30 ish starts but with an ERA most years that is going to be more in the 4.00 – 4.25 range.

He doesn’t labor, has an athletic build and looks durable. He won’t be easily displaced right away by any of the very young arms the O’s have percolating in AA/AAA. His success last season actually gives me great fear that Elias will just try to bring back Trevor Rogers as a free agent and pretend he’s got this pitching thing finally all figured out, but I am buying Young as an MLB arm, and that’s a win for a franchise that is desperate for them.

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