Orioles reportedly re-sign Zach Eflin to one-year contract

The Orioles are reuniting with one of their free agents from last season. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported on Sunday evening that the team is bringing back starting pitcher Zach Eflin. It’s a one-year contract with $10 million guaranteed, according to Jon Heyman.

Eflin, who turns 32 early next season, was acquired from the Rays for three prospects ahead of the deadline in July 2024. After putting up a 2.60 ERA across nine starts – interrupted by a short injured list stint – following that trade, hopes were high for Eflin going into 2025. He spent the season alternating between hurt and bad, ultimately starting just 14 games. By season’s end, he had a 5.93 ERA. This was one of the many things that went wrong in the 2025 Orioles season.

Eflin did not make a start after the end of July. He had surgery for a back injury in August, which at the time had something of an open-ended recovery time. The hope was that it might end up closer to a four-month recovery, allowing for a close to normal offseason, though a recovery as long as eight months was also in the window. We can guess that the O’s signing him for $10 million at this juncture suggests that the Orioles feel good about how the rehab is going.

First reaction: Is this a sign that Mike Elias is throwing in the towel on making an expensive signing that aims to improve the top of the starting rotation?

You could sketch out a starting rotation at this point, assuming everyone is healthy between now and Opening Day, that goes like this: Kyle Bradish, Trevor Rogers, Shane Baz, Zach Eflin, Dean Kremer, with Tyler Wells probably as the next man up. It is a big assumption that everyone will stay healthy, including Eflin himself, so to some extent this could be seen as building more insurance into the rotation situation.

That’s something that was lacking in 2025 as well, which led to guys like Cade Povich and Brandon Young being exposed. Solving that problem for 2026 is important.

It is hard to imagine Elias making another move that pushes Kremer out of the initial starting five, without even getting into whether he would spend big money on one of Tatsuya Imai, Ranger Suárez, or Framber Valdez. I’m not even a Kremer fan and I think that would be crazy. On the other hand, Elias has done multiple things this offseason already that I couldn’t have imagined two months ago: Trading Grayson Rodriguez, signing Pete Alonso, trading for Baz. Another surprise wouldn’t be all that surprising after all.

Imai’s posting window comes to a close on January 2, so there will be an answer where he’s settling in within a week. If he’s not going to be Elias’s guy, how quickly might he pivot to the others? Or has he already evaluated them and decided he doesn’t want to go down that road? Like everything else about this offseason, we won’t know until we know.