Trevor Rogers' injury leaves the Orioles counting on unproven arms looking for a chance

Coming into the season, the Baltimore Orioles had more starters than they could fit on the active roster. After adding Trevor Rogers to the IL with the designation of illness, that Opening Day depth chart feels like a distant memory. With three members of the Orioles rotation now on the IL, Brandon Young and Cade Povich have suddenly become important characters in the Orioles 2026 season.

Young and Povich have both already made appearances earlier this season and performed very well in those opportunities. Those were spot starts, though, and it was understood at the time that they would return to the minors once the job was done. Now that Rogers is down in addition to Kremer, one or both of Young and Povich will be on the roster till mid-May.

Cade Povich and Brandon Young have a chance to leave their mark

That's assuming that both Kremer and Rogers will be back as soon as their time on the IL ends, which is far from a given. Kremer went down with a hamstring strain. Hamstrings are notoriously tricky, and once a player has injured a hamstring, it's hard to avoid injuring it again unless you're extremely careful. Pushing off the mound to create 95 mph fastballs is not being extremely careful. That injury could take a while to bounce back from.

Rogers' injury designation was originally "illness", and the club later clarified that it was the flu. Oddly, they put him on the 15-day IL for the flu on Wednesday because he wasn't supposed to start for two more days, and he could have been pushed back a third because of the off day on Monday. Some fans theorised that it's a phantom IL because of how Rogers has been struggling, but Rogers hasn't looked fake-injury bad, and if he did, there's like 50 different injury designations that would attract less attention than "illness".

Now that the Orioles have put Rogers on the 15-day IL for the flu, the soonest he can come back is May 11th, and that's assuming he's better by then. If what he has is so bad that the Orioles wanted to scratch him three days before his start day, there's a chance this could result in an extended absence. In the past years, a few players have gone out with illness and, while sick, lost so much weight they couldn't perform at their usual level. Hopefully, that's not the case with Rogers, but it's on the board.

Povich and Young are joining the Orioles rotation at a crossroads for both the Orioles season and themselves. Over the next few weeks, the Orioles will face the Yankees, the best team in the AL, seven times. If they get roughed up in those two series, that could be the end of their chance to compete for the division. That sounds dramatic, but a bad two-week stretch in May last year got Brandon Hyde fired and basically eliminated the Orioles from the postseason.

Inversely, if they hang with the Yankees and Povich and Young continue to pitch well in this opportunity, they'll keep their hopes in the division alive, and with how much other members of the Orioles rotation have struggled this season, the young guys could end up stealing a permanent rotation spot from one or two of the veterans.

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