Binging With Bradish: The Orioles Add Five Years of Kyle to the Menu

You know the joke. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” asks the interviewer. Mitch Hedberg has the perfect answer. “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me this question.” Mike Elias and the Orioles sure seem to have their own five-year plan, and they fleshed it out on Sunday, signing right-hander Kyle Bradish to a five-year, $90 million extension. The deal buys out the starter’s final two years of arbitration, along with three free agent years, keeping him in orange and black until his age-35 season in 2031. Bradish is making $3.55 million in arbitration this season, and he’ll make $10 million when the new deal kicks in next year. He’ll get a $3 million raise in 2028, then get $1 million added to his annual raise in each subsequent season. So he’ll make $10 million in 2027, then 13, then 17, then 22, then 28 in 2031. It’s a classic example of linear growth rather than exponential, and it should help Bradish stay a step ahead of inflation. According to The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, it’s also the largest deal for a pitcher in franchise history.

Bradish has a 3.50 ERA and a 3.62 FIP for his career, but there’s still room for some uncertainty in his profile. He debuted in 2022 and put up ugly numbers across 23 starts, running a 4.90 ERA and a 4.46 FIP. He broke out in 2023, going 12-7 with a 2.83 ERA and a 3.27 FIP. The underlying numbers weren’t quite so spectacular, as a big component of his improvement was a drop in home run rate that looked unsustainably large. Although Bradish had made more sustainable improvements to his walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, it still would have been fair to expect some regression. Instead, he came out of the gate even better in 2024. His walk rate did indeed regress, but he suppressed homers even further and ratcheted his strikeout rate all the way up to 33%. It was a huge jump, but it lasted just eight starts before the god of ulnar collateral ligaments demanded its tribute.

Bradish returned from Tommy John surgery at the end of August 2025, and he picked up right where he’d left off before the injury. In fact, over his six starts, he struck out more than 37% of the batters he faced. If you combine the two seasons, Bradish threw 71 1/3 innings across 14 starts, posting a 2.65 ERA and a 2.48 FIP. He put up 2.5 WAR in what was essentially half a season. It was legitimate dominance.

Alas, Bradish hasn’t quite looked like the same guy this season. He’s running a 3.61 ERA and a 4.00 FIP, with peripherals to match. His strikeout rate has dropped to 23%, and his 11% walk rate is a career high. He looks more solid than spectacular. He has one of the steeper arm angles in the game, and that unusual look no doubt helps him keep batters on their toes. This year, however, his arm angle has dropped a couple degrees, which is likely part of the reason his four-seamer has lost half a tick of velocity and a couple inches of rise. On the other hand, he’s still figuring things out. He altered his delivery in early May, and started leaning more on his sinker than his four-seamer in June. If you’ll forgive some arbitrary endpoints that erase a couple of late-April and early-May clunkers, Bradish has a 2.95 ERA and a 3.63 FIP since May 8, thanks to small improvements to both his walk and strikeout rates.

Toward the end of June, over on RotoGraphs, Corbin Young took an excellent look at what has been ailing Bradish this season. Young’s main diagnoses were downturns in both command and the ability to miss bats. He noted that despite a career Location+ of 105, Bradish was at 90 this season. Because of the All-Star break, Bradish has only made three starts since that article came out, but it’s at least worth noting that he has put up a Location+ of 104 in that three-start span, and his whiff rate has jumped six points to 81%. In two of those starts, his four-seamer velocity ticked back up over 95 mph for the first time all season. I’m not saying we should read all that much into such a tiny sample, but it’s reassuring to see that he can get back up there, and it’s allowed us to be at least a little bit more optimistic about him going forward.

As for why the timing is right for Bradish to sign this particular deal, we have no shortage of factors to consider. The expiration of the current league’s collective bargaining agreement hangs over all negotiations, as no one knows quite what the landscape will look like next year and beyond. Bradish is coming off two excellent, but Tommy-John-truncated seasons, and he’s now locked himself into a deal through age 35. That’s got to look reassuring to a pitcher who will, in seven weeks’ time, be cutting his 30th birthday cake with the help of a brand new UCL. Maybe you think he would have been able to find a three-year deal with an AAV of $18 million as a 32-year-old, when he was initially slated for free agency, but that’s definitely not a slam dunk. Dan Szymborski and his friendly ZiPS machine modeled what a 2027 extension might look like back in March. It came out to five years and $61 million, even though ZiPS projected that Bradish would we pitching a bit better this season than he has so far. Bradish has blown that out of the water.

From a management perspective, it’s not hard to imagine that the Orioles see themselves as buying at least a little bit low here, even after you price in some risk. While Bradish isn’t quite pitching up to his previous standard after his first healthy offseason in two years, his stuff doesn’t seem all that far off either. This is his fourth straight season with an ERA that’s at least 13% better than the league average, and they clearly think he’s got a few more in the tank. Even in his brief appearances over the past two years, which add up to something a bit under half a season for a starter, our simple dollars-per-WAR calculations have Bradish worth $20 million.

Moreover, the Orioles are in extension mode. They inked catching phenom Samuel Basallo to an eight-year extension just under a year ago and fellow starter Shane Baz to his own five-year deal in March. Add in the five-year contract that Pete Alonso signed during the Winter Meetings, and you get the sense that the Orioles envision themselves enjoying the cool breeze from this contention window, which opened in 2023, for another five years. If you’re an Orioles fan, you are probably tired of banging your head against the wall hoping for the team to make bigger moves during this window. Neither Gunnar Henderson nor Adley Rutschman has signed an extension. With all due respect to Chris Bassitt, Ryan Helsley, and the re-signed Zach Eflin – who have led distinguished careers but were all at least a year removed from their best form when they signed with Baltimore – Alonso was the team’s only major offseason addition after a fourth year in a row of crushed expectations.

It’s hard to say what this deal might indicate about the team’s plans at the deadline. MLB.com’s Jake Rill wrote on July 15 that the Orioles could end up as either buyers or sellers, depending on where they end up at the end of the month. Over the five days since that article was published, the Orioles have remained two games out of the final Wild Card spot, but because they’ve gone 3-0 while the Twins, Astros, and Blue Jays have all faltered, their Playoff Odds have jumped from 21.6% up to 31.0%. Bradish makes his first start as a big-money pitcher on Tuesday, and he’ll make one more before the trade deadline. There’s a legitimate chance that if he shoves in those two appearances, it’ll be enough to push the team into adding. It would be a pretty good start toward making good on his shiny new contract.