It has been, at times, a rocky path for Shane Baz, a former first-round pick who had a solid but unspectacular season last year for the Tampa Bay Rays.<\/p>\n
But in acquiring the hard-throwing righthander, the Baltimore Orioles believe the best of Baz is yet to come \u2014 and it will happen in an Orioles uniform.<\/p>\n
President of baseball operations Mike Elias spoke to the media a day after making the trade, which sent four Orioles prospects and a draft pick to Tampa for the 26-year-old from Texas<\/a>. Elias goes way back with Baz, whom he scouted as a hotshot high schooler when he worked for the Astros. <\/p>\n Aside from an electric arm, which Elias said gives him the ceiling to be \u201ca top of the rotation starter,\u201d the Orioles believe that now two years removed from Tommy John surgery, he has a chance to recapture the potential scouts saw as a teenager.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know what kind of athlete he is and the ceiling he\u2019s got,\u201d Elias said. \u201cAnd he\u2019s at a really good juncture \u2026 platforming into 2026. We kind of think he\u2019s ready to go, and [we\u2019re] kind of expecting we\u2019re gonna get the best chunk of his career here coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n With a five-pitch mix, Baz had a high-tier fastball velocity last season (88th percentile, according to Baseball Savant) but struggled in his home ballpark. Offseason storm damage to Tropicana Park forced the team to relocate to Steinbrenner Field, a Triple A ballpark, for the 2025 season. In 82 \u2153 innings, Baz posted a 5.90 ERA there compared to a 3.86 ERA on the road.<\/p>\n But Baz is coming off his biggest workload (166 \u2153 innings) of his career, which was interrupted in 2023 by Tommy John surgery. Elias pointed to his \u201cbad luck\u201d at the Rays\u2019 home field as one of the factors that overshadowed \u201cone of the best starting pitcher arms in the major leagues.\u201d<\/p>\n Elias emphasized that the Orioles don\u2019t necessarily view him as a front-end starter for the coming year, leaving open the possibility that the team is not done yet in its pursuit of an ace-quality pitcher<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think the roster is a finished product,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna keep working for opportunities to keep improving the roster.\u201d<\/p>\n While the haul the Orioles gave up for Baz is significant, one of the biggest factors Elias said led them to doing business with the Rays is it didn\u2019t cost the Orioles any of the players who might help them in the near term<\/a>. <\/p>\n Although players including Coby Mayo, Dylan Beavers and Enrique Bradfield have circled by baseball observers as possible trade candidates at logjam positions for the Orioles, Elias didn\u2019t have to give any of them up for the Rays to relinquish Baz, who has three more years of team control left on his contract.<\/p>\n \u201cWe expressed a desire to try to avoid the players on our major league roster right now in this trade, and they [the Rays] had other opportunities with Shane where they were getting players either in the big leagues or close to the big leagues,\u201d Elias said. \u201cWe were steering more towards guys we had just drafted, or a draft pick itself. So, this is very much a move about the next few years with this major league team.\u201d<\/p>\n