Baltimore Orioles reliever Oliver Drake worked a scoreless frame in a loss to the Minnesota Twins on Tuesday, and is now up to seven scoreless innings on the spring. The 29-year-old has mixed in strikeouts with a mid-90s fastball and has flashed good secondary pitches thus far in Grapefruit League action. Depending on what happens with the arms in front of him, and maybe even just on his own merit, but it sure seems like Drake has a pretty good shot of cracking the team’s Opening Day bullpen.
Projection systems have gone a bit crazy over Drake. Probably the most moderate of them all is Baseball Reference, which has Drake tossing 33 innings with a 3.82 ERA, 8.2 K/9 and a 1.33 WHIP. That alone is pretty solid in middle relief. The projections housed at Fangraphs are even more bullish on Drake, however.
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Steamer pegs Drake for more than a strikeout per inning with an iffy, but solid all-things-considered walk rate of 3.7 per nine. They don’t have a big innings total projected, but the strikeout total still places him among the elite from that bullpen, which is bound to be a good one. Zach Britton, Darren O’Day, Brad Brach and Mychal Givens are all expected to be strikeout dynamos, and Drake is sort of expected to come out of left field to join them.
The ZiPS system is even more optimistic. ZiPS sees nearly 50 innings out of Drake, with an otherworldly 10.5 K/9, 3.8 BB/9 and a 3.33 ERA. Those numbers would put Drake in pretty rare company; just 28 relievers (out of 131) who threw at least 50 innings last year had more than 10.5 K/9. Where is all this optimism coming for a 29-year-old who only debuted last year, and threw just 15.2 good, but not great innings?
ESPN’s Dan Szymborski, the proprietor of ZiPS and a bit of an O’s fan to boot, suspects it’s the elite strikeout rates in the minors, hearkening back to when he worked on and mastered a split finger. Drake moved to a relief role full time in 2013 at Double-A Bowie, and his strikeout rate jumped from 6.6 K/9 in his previous full season with the Baysox to 11, and it’s only jumped since. He went back to Bowie in 2014 and it skipped up to 12.1 K/9, and it peaked last year with Norfolk at 13.5. It’s not unusual for a reliever to be a late bloomer, and it sure looks like that may be the case with Drake.
Drake’s fastball was in the mid 90s against the Twins on Tuesday, though it sat at just 90.6 in the big leagues last season. He doesn’t throw the straight fastball too terribly much either way; in his short big league stint he threw the splitter (56 percent) far more frequently than the four-seamer (41.9 percent), and barely threw his slider at all. PITCHf/x says his heater never got above 92.9 mph last year, while the split was generally around 81-82 mph, with a high of 84.6 mph and a low of 78.9.
Drake gave up just one home run last year in the big leagues — to Kevin Kiermaier of the Rays — and it came on the fastball. It’s not hard to see why he scorns the fastball, as opponents plastered it to the tune of a .263/.400/.474 line. Meanwhile, opponents hit the split at a .273/.324/.333 line (.675 OPS), with the limited power numbers (just two doubles) largely chalked up to a 56.5 percent groundball rate induced by the pitch.
One thing that isn’t clear to me is that PITCHf/x has Drake with a split and a changeup. If they’re the same pitch but the algorithm is tracking them differently, that’s also worth noting. The split had a swinging strike rate of 14.9 percent, which is fine but not overwhelmingly great for a breaking/offspeed strikeout pitch. The changeup, which PITCHf/x caught 31 times, had a swinging strike rate of 29 percent — super elite — and just a .444 OPS against. That is, just two singles.
Of course, there’s plenty of difficulty with trying to deduce too much from these small samples. Still, I come away feeling like he’s more of a deception guy than he is a bullpen linchpin. I feel like he’ll get a crack at the front of the bullpen, especially if injuries force someone like Vance Worley into the rotation, but he’ll only go as far as his results dictate. Thus is the life of a 29-year-old minor league lifer, huh?
Orioles Analyst
Warne is a Minnesota Twins beat reporter for 105 The Ticket’s Cold Omaha website as well as a sportswriter for Sportradar U.S. in downtown Minneapolis. He also contributes to FanGraphs / RotoGraphs.