Orioles' bullpen is being reshaped by one unexpected reliever right now

Coming into the 2026 season, the Baltimore Orioles' bullpen was an area of great concern for their roster. After trading away most of the familiar faces from the last few seasons at last year's trade deadline and replacing them with mostly unproven journeymen, it was already a bold strategy that seemed even more problematic when two of the Orioles veteran relievers went down in spring training and left the bullpen even more vulnerable than previously imagined. However, so far this season, the Orioles' bullpen has performed admirably.

With any bullpen, success is a team effort. So there are many pitchers who deserve credit for the bullpen's success so far, but one contributor has looked especially sharp, and if they can keep up what they've shown so far, the Orioles may have a solid back of the bullpen after all.

Rico Garcia is proving that his strong finish to 2025 was not a fluke

Rico Garcia took a long path to get to where he is now. He's been in seven different organizations and was even on the Orioles for a few months back in 2022. He's never been able to stick. From 2019-2023, he bounced around, and between all his teams, he put up a 7.32 ERA in 35 innings. He spent all of 2024 in the minors. In 2025, he was designated for assignment by the Mets, the Yankees, and then the Mets again. Finally, it was the post-trade deadline Orioles who scooped him up and held onto him.

Garcia was really good for the Orioles as they finished 2025.

That's all well and good when you're pitching for a team that's tanking the rest of the season away, but when the Orioles brought him back for 2026, there was a real question of whether what Garcia showed in the last few months of 2025 was legit. Certain numbers, like stuff+, would argue in his favor, but others, like FIP and WHIP, suggested that he might be due to regress to the journeyman taxi-squad pitcher he was for his entire career leading up to 2025. As impressive as his numbers were, he only pitched 34 innings last year, and only 19 of those were for the Orioles.

The Orioles did bring him back, though, and Garcia has rewarded them for their faith by being absolutely lights out. His ERA is 0.00; he's struck out a third of the batters he's faced; his expected batting average against is .152; and he's in the 99th percentile in ground-ball rate. He's got everything working right now.

The big change between his breakout last year and his previous seasons was the quality of his fastball. For most of his career, Stuff+ rated his fastball very below average. Then last season, it jumped up to well above average. The question was: Is that the result of a change he made and therefore repeatable, or was it a flash in the pan? So far this year, his fastball is once again above average. That's not even mentioning the fact that his curveball is now rated as one of the best in the league.

Putting aside the numbers, just watching him on the mound, he looks very comfortable. The Orioles threw him into the fire to start his season by calling on him in a bases-loaded jam the way they had done a couple of times the year before. Garcia was up to the challenge. Garcia was under the weather in Pittsburgh, and knowing the Orioles called his number in a close game with a runner in scoring position, he did not fail them.

In the Orioles final game against Chicago, when the Orioles needed someone to close out a two-run game because Helsley had closed out the last two, it was Garcia they turned to. Closing out games is a different beast, and it was apparent that Garcia was feeling the pressure in his first-ever MLB save opportunity. He was uncharacteristically wild, walked two batters, but he buckled down and got the job done, preserving the Orioles' lead and his pristine ERA.

With Garcia pitching this well, the Orioles have an unexpected high-leverage arm. Once Andrew Kittredge returns, the trio of Garcia, Kittredge, and Helsley will be a formidable lineup of arms for the Orioles to throw at their opponents in the late innings of close games.