About the best possible way to date your article is to start with a score, so I won’t. Suffice it to say the Orioles are in contention for a playoff spot. That’s mostly due to the enlarged playoffs this season, but hey, when things are enlarged that’s usually bad, and this is not bad, it’s good. So that is good. What that good is not due to is their starting rotation. Coming into the season nobody thought the rotation would be good and as it turns out, nobody was right. The rotation has been bad. But then a week or so ago, the Orioles brought up two young starting pitchers. Neither projects as an ace (though this is 2020 and baseball is weird anyway, so who really knows?), but their track records in the minor leagues as well as their first turns in the rotation are promising. Can these two guys change the Orioles playoff fortunes for the better?
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The two guys up for discussion are Keegan Akin and Dean Kremer. Akin was a second round pick by the Orioles back in 2016 while Kremer was a 16th round pick of the Dodgers that same year and came to Baltimore as part of the trade for Manny Machado. Neither is particularly young at this point, at least not by the standards of young major leaguers, as Akin is 25 and Kremer will be 25 in January. As there are no minor leagues this year, Orioles brass wisely decided to get them some major league time following the trade deadline, and brought them both up within a week or so of each other.
Akin started two games and relieved in two others while Kremer started just once (he came up a week later so he hasn’t had the chance to start again yet). As starters, they’ve combined for 15 2/3 innings pitched with just one earned run allowed (and that might not have scored had Rio Ruiz not double-clutched a possible double play ball at third base). Perhaps more tellingly, they’ve struck out 21 batters while walking nine and allowing (probably obviously) no home runs. Combined they faced 62 hitters which works out to a strikeout percentage of 34 percent. Five starting pitchers in baseball boast a higher strike out percentage: Shane Bieber, Jacob deGrom, Trevor Bauer, Aaron Nola, and Lucas Giolito. That’s the who’s-who of the best pitchers in baseball so far this year.
The combined walk rate is high at 14 percent, mostly due to Akin walking four Yankees in his second start (none of the previously mentioned starters has a walk percentage higher than Giolito’s 8.4). Mostly though, the two have produced results commiserate with a number one starter, if perhaps understandably a bit light on the innings pitched. This is both amazing and unexpected. So who are these two guys?
Of course the two are two, not one, so I’ll stop treating them that way. Let’s start with Kremer because he intrigues me most. I had never seen him pitch before his first start on September 6th against the Yankees. I was impressed with his results, but also with his stuff. He doesn’t have a blow-you-away fastball, but he got it up to 95 in the first inning, which is plenty fast enough. The velocity fell a bit after that (understandable for a guy to over-throw a bit in the first inning of his first major league start) but never below the low 90s. His delivery is smooth, he works fast, which is nice, and his command and control of his pitches was average to slightly above. Overall it’s a very intriguing package!
If anything will make him special though it will be his curveball. That thing has some serious drop! The pitch is in the high 70s which works great with his fastball, and it falls off the table. It’s a mostly vertical break, but one that he’s able to throw both in the zone and outside of it. What I mean: a curveball is, by design, deceptive. Sometimes a pitcher wants the pitch to appear to be headed outside the strike zone so the batter gives up on it, then the pitch enters the zone and is called a strike. Other times, it’s the opposite, a pitch looks like it’s going to be a strike, then it drops out of the zone but too late for the batter who swings at it anyway. Kremer showed the ability to do both with his curveball, and got strikes both times. A pitch with that much break can be difficult to command, so it’s notable that he did so well at it, though admittedly it was only one start.
Kremer also features a cutter or slider. I wasn’t impressed with that offering, and he didn’t throw it often (just 13 percent of the time). The pitch moves a bit right to left and has a small amount of drop to it, but it’s really not enough to fool a hitter who has seen it before, which the Yankees had not. It’s not a bad pitch, but it’s nothing special. Beyond that, there were some pitches the depleted Yankees lineup should’ve hit better than they did, and a few hard hits that went for outs as well. It wasn’t a perfect start, though if you squinted enough it did kinda look like it. Kremer isn’t Clayton Kershaw and that’s okay. The combination of the three pitches and his average-to-above command led to an impressive outing, and I’m already eager to see what he does when he goes back out there next time, and Orioles fans should be as well.
Akin is, to be frank, the less exciting option of the two. He is left handed and features a mid-to-low 90s fastball that is really his main offering. He has a changeup as well and that looked particularly good at times, slow enough to play well off his fastball and with just a hair of drop at the end. It’s not an amazing pitch, like Kremer’s curve, at least it wasn’t when I was watching. Some scouts have given it higher grades, but to me it looked pretty average. In fact, that’s kinda the thing about Akin: none of his pitches really stand out, and he doesn’t have the command that Kremer does. There were a couple times when he lost the strike zone and that led to a lot of walks and some pitches that the Yankees (again) probably should’ve hit harder than they did. On the whole though, Akin is an intriguing pitcher and likely one who can positively impact the franchise, even if that ends up being in the bullpen or in a hybrid one time through the order opener kind of role.
The exciting thing here though is that both guys showed what is possible. They can both set down a lineup and they both have the stuff and command to get major league hitters out. Right now Akin and Kremer are big upgrades for this Orioles rotation, and that, plus the fact that this team is still not out of the playoff race yet, should make for a fun final month of the 2020 baseball season.
Orioles Analyst
Matthew Kory is a Orioles / MLB Analyst for BSL. He has covered baseball professionally for The Athletic, Vice Sports, Sports On Earth, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two boys, and his cats, Mini Squeaks and The President. Co-Host of The Warehouse.