Mike Elias Seems Intent On Pretending Anthony Nunez Is Something He Is Not

Mike Elias is about a pigheaded a baseball executive as they come, and he can be pretty silly like pretending Trevor Rogers or Jack Flaherty were going to lift his team in a playoff push or pretending Eloy Jimenez was going to do anything but hit soft ground balls.

He’s beholden to jerking young prospects around to multiple positions to unnecessarily stunt and complicate their development, and brainwashing his prospects into chasing launch angle above all else. And when he really wants an acquisition to work, despite empirical evidence it cannot and will not, to try to make himself look good (pretending AAA-arm Shintaro Fujinami was a pennant race high-leverage guy), he will spite the team repeatedly to continue chasing that pipedream.

Anthony Nunez, a potentially useful enough middle-innings arm on a team that will need several (since most starters can’t provide length), is the latest player caught in this vortex. Elias is going to end up having landed not very much from his trade deadline sell off of 2025, including among the bundle of single-A lottery tickets he amassed to try to goose his Baseball America rankings, and very little of it is MLB ready.

Nunez, 24, a converted position player who he landed from the Mets in the Cedric Mullins trade, is interesting enough to be in Baltimore. And he had a torrid start, but as sample size has expended he is getting exposed, yet keeps showing up in the 8th inning in high-leverage situations. This is a mistake, an obvious mistake, and not one that rookie puppet skipper Craig Albernaz is repeating because he’s a rogue agent; it’s precisely what his boss wants.

Now, what Nunez’s body of work is really telling us is that less is more right now, but they don’t like to listen to reality in The Warehouse when they get stuck in about something (like two years of Adley Rutschman sucking the life out of the lineup in the two hole or three hole).

Troublesome Trends

Before we go any deeper, let’s just look at Nunez – who was thrust back into a 1-1 game against Toronto Thursday and gave up a lead-off double to George Springer and ended up walking him in as the winning run – from April and May.

April: 2.35 ERA 10.6 K/9 0.98 WHIP .615 Opposing OPS

May: 8.74 ERA 9.5 K/9 1.68 WHIP .838 Opposing OPS

Yikes.

Continually forcing him into the toughest spots facing the best parts of the lineup isn’t working for Nunez, or the team. Ramping him into that role as quickly as they did – especially with Rico Garcia and Yennier Cano sparkling – is a little odd, but clearly Elias has a thing for this one.

How’s the high-leverage stuff working out?

Well, Nunez has walked eight batters and struck out just nine in 47 plate appearances against him in high-leverage spots. In medium-leverage situations Nunez is allowing a troublesome .304/.304/.609 slash line. With runners in scoring position, the league has a .924 OPS against him.

And in low-leverage situations, well, as you might expect, Nunez is allowing just a .578 OPS. Now, can you totally hide him? Probably not. But I’m not the one saying he absolutely, positively has to be in the bullpen to begin with. Eight years into a perpetual rebuild there should be other options.

Getting their closer back from the Injured List should help reassign some roles - though that's already been delayed beyond how it was originally billed. And with Cano now potentially ailing the reality is full health on any staff is elusive. Accepting young arms for what they are shouldn't be this impossible a task.

This is going to be a season that doesn’t sniff what Elias billed it as, and they should be sizing up and checking out pen possibilities. But watching them continually DFA Albert Suarez despite him doing the job in relief and bailing them out for years (and good on him for denying their last attempt to stash him in AAA before signing back to active roster), and yo-yo top pitching prospect Trey Gibson all over the place at the same time they seem intent on propping up Nunez as something he is not, it just reminds you of what an unserious, bush league operation they are running over there.

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