Keegan Akin’s last second injury leaves the Orioles bullpen in a bad spot

The Baltimore Orioles' offseason approach to building a bullpen was risky. They sold off most of their veteran relievers at last year's trade deadline for a haul of prospects. At the start of the offseason, they signed Ryan Helsley and Andrew Kittredge. It seemed like they were well on their way to putting together a solid bullpen, and then they didn't do anything else to address it. Now that Keegan Akin went down in the last weekend of spring training, it appears that doing very little and crossing their fingers that nobody would get hurt was not a good strategy after all.

With Akin and Kittredge both set to miss the beginning of the season, the Orioles will go forward with only two relievers who have pitched a full season out of the bullpen in the last five years, Helsley and Yennier Cano. Those two are both former all-stars, which is good, but they're both coming off career-worst seasons.

In 2025, Cano had an ERA of 5.12, and Helsley's was 4.50, not exactly the numbers you'd hope to see from your backend relievers. Outside of those two, nobody in the Orioles bullpen has any sort of recent track record of extended success.

Orioles' offseason bullpen strategy is already coming around to bite them

Most of the healthy arms in the Orioles bullpen were DFA'd once, if not multiple times, last year. Relievers are volatile, and every year, there are examples of relievers who were previously mediocre who come out of nowhere and suddenly are lights out for a season. Any one of the Orioles' waiver claims has the potential to be one of these inspirational stories.

As nice as it is to have so much potential for a heartwarming comeback story, it does not seem wise to build the bullpen almost entirely out of guys who will have to have by far the best year of their careers in order to be viable.

To some extent, every team's success depends on a couple of "ifs". If this rookie breaks out, if this pitcher stays healthy, yada yada. You want your team's "ifs" to be plausible. For example, one of the big "ifs" for the Yankees is that they will be good if Aaron Judge stays healthy. Aaron Judge has been mostly healthy for the past half-decade. That's a plausible "if".

The "if" for the Orioles bullpen in this case is that it will be fine if five different guys have the best year of their career by a lot and their two veterans bounce back from mediocrity. That's asking a lot from a large number of people and the odds are long that that will happen.

By design, the Orioles didn't give themselves much margin for error in their bullpen, and before the season started, that margin has closed. They've put themselves in a position where, unless their scrappy group of castoffs and misfits pitches out their minds to start the season, they're going to blow a lot of games. When that happens, it won't be Jackson Kowar's fault that he gave up a three-run homer to flip the game in the seventh innings; it will be the front office's fault that that's the caliber of pitcher that Craig Albernaz has to put on the mound at the end of a close game.