Orioles acquire pitcher Jack Flaherty from Cardinals, fortifying rotation at MLB trade deadline

The Orioles hoped to use the trade deadline to upgrade their starting rotation. As the time ticked away for them to do so, they made their move.

Minutes before Tuesday’s MLB trade deadline, Baltimore acquired right-hander Jack Flaherty, a pending free agent, from the St. Louis Cardinals for Triple-A Norfolk infielder César Prieto and left-hander Drew Rom and Low-A Delmarva right-hander Zack Showalter, the organization’s Nos. 13, 15 and 16 prospects according to Baseball America.

“I think that this landed in an appropriate spot for both teams,” executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said. “I’m sure these players will go on to have very fruitful careers, but we’re here, 2023 is a priority. I’ve spoken before about how my job is balancing that priority against the future and not doing an exchange that we will overly regret or be unwise, but I think this landed in the right spot in that regard.”

In 20 starts with the Cardinals, the 27-year-old Flaherty had a 4.43 ERA, only a tick better than the 4.48 mark Baltimore’s starters have collectively posted through Monday. He’s coming off a strong July, however, recording a 3.03 ERA in five starts and pitching at least six innings in four of them.

Flaherty looked like a future star in 2019, when as a 23-year-old he finished fourth in National League Cy Young Award voting thanks to a 2.75 ERA and an NL-best 0.968 WHIP. In the four seasons since, his ERA across 55 games, all but three starts, is 4.12. He’s regarded as a league-average pitcher over that span by ERA+, which accounts for external factors such as ballparks and opponents.

“It’s four above-average pitches, and perhaps his execution has come and gone,” Elias said. “We’ve had success thus far this year with some game-planning stuff that our pitchers have done pretty well with. It’s helped their stuff play up. We’ve got two excellent catchers, we’ve got a great defense, we’ll see. I don’t know yet. I just like the talent, I like the experience, I like what comes out of his hands. Players are going to have some seasons that are better than others, and maybe we can get him hot here in the next couple months.”

Elias repeatedly emphasized that Flaherty supplies another experienced arm to a rotation that needed one. Dean Kremer, Kyle Bradish, Tyler Wells and Grayson Rodriguez entered this season with fewer than 40 career major league starts. Including the minors, Rodriguez, Baltimore’s top pitching prospect, already has thrown more innings than he had any previous season. Kremer is 15 frames from doing the same. Wells, who is less than six innings shy of his career mark, was optioned to Double-A Bowie on Sunday to get what manager Brandon Hyde described as a “break” and “reset” after he struggled in three second-half starts.

Elias and Hyde have said the Orioles take more than innings counts into consideration when evaluating pitchers’ workloads. But the need for another arm became even more apparent with Wells’ struggles. Flaherty presumably takes Wells’ spot in Baltimore’s rotation, with the club having not announced a starter for Thursday’s series finale with the Toronto Blue Jays. Flaherty pitched most recently last Wednesday, allowing three runs on eight hits in five innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“We need help with the innings load down the stretch,” Elias said. “We’ve got a lot of young starters that haven’t done this before. We’ve got members of our relief corps that are injured or tired, and so we were just looking for pitching help in all shapes and sizes.”

The Orioles signed Prieto, 24, out of Cuba before last season. A former Cuban batting champion, he was hitting .349/.393/.375 between Double-A and Triple-A. Rom, 23, was Baltimore’s fourth-round draft pick in 2018 and has a 5.34 ERA in 19 outings, all but one a start, for Norfolk. He did not pitch for the Orioles during a brief call-up in May. Showalter, 19, was the club’s 11th-round pick in 2022 and has a 2.37 ERA in nine games in the Florida Complex League and Low-A.

“When you’re on the buy side, you tend to kind of lose every trade because you’re giving away years and years and years of future for a very short impact,” Elias said. “But that’s part of trying to win and the focus on the team that’s in a good position.”

The Orioles were linked to other starters throughout Tuesday, including Detroit Tigers left-hander Eduardo Rodriguez, Chicago White Sox right-hander Dylan Cease and New York Mets ace Justin Verlander. Of those three, only Verlander was traded, with the three-time Cy Young Award winner returning to the Houston Astros. Baltimore also sought another reliever after acquiring Shintaro Fujinami from the Oakland Athletics for No. 30 prospect Easton Lucas on July 19 but was unable to complete a deal.

“We took some very big swings, and some things came close,” Elias said. “The trade deadline is really hard because when you start working on something, you block off opportunities elsewhere. You can get locked up and you don’t really know if it’s going to go to fruition. It’s just a hard thing to navigate. It’s very, very challenging, it can be tense. This was as tense of one as I’ve seen and as challenging one as I’ve seen. But [Flaherty] was one of the pitchers that from the very get-go of our planning we circled as a fit.”

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