Disappointment is the usual thing for Orioles fans when it comes to starting pitching prospects. This long predates Mike Elias’s tenure as general manager of the team, or even his predecessor Dan Duquette. Sometimes people come up with names for groups of them like the much-ballyhooed “cavalry” of Dave Trembley’s time. Call them what you will, so frequently these guys have just ended up getting hurt or not being as good as evaluators thought, or some of both.
I mention all of this before saying one word about Joseph Dzierwa because all of that was on my mind before we were all introduced to him by the Orioles bringing him into some spring training games early this year. It’s true that Dzierwa is the highest-drafted pitcher taken by Elias yet, a second-round pick from the 2025 draft taken out of Michigan State, and that was worth noting all on its own. Yet at times in recent years it has seemed like as soon as people take notice of an unheralded Orioles starting pitching prospect, he implodes. This happened last year to Keeler Morfe, and this year to Esteban Mejia.
After impressing in those spring training games, Dzierwa smoothly carried that over into the regular season. The team assigned him straight to High-A Frederick for his first real pro action; he didn’t debut after being drafted last season, an increasingly-common decision teams make with their pitchers.
Within about two games, it was clear that I was going to have to quickly absorb how to spell and pronounce Dzierwa to do my job of writing and talking about the Orioles. (Per the Keys media guide, the pronunciation is JER-va.) Dzierwa introduced himself to the minor league world by striking out nine batters over a six inning start – with only 79 pitches thrown! – against Texas’s High-A affiliate. He went seven innings the next time out, and by the middle of May, he’d recorded three different games where he struck out nine opposing batters.
It wasn’t just the strikeouts. People weren’t doing much of anything when facing Dzierwa. He walked one or fewer batters in seven of his eight starts with Frederick, and he was sitting on a 2.21 ERA and 0.811 WHIP when the Orioles decided it was time to challenge Dzierwa with Double-A. That’s a decently aggressive move for a guy who just got drafted last year. Dzierwa went on to pitch 18 games for Chesapeake after that promotion and he posted a nearly-as-good 2.29 ERA at that higher level.
Under the hood, this was a bit less impressive than the High-A totals. While still striking out more than a batter per inning, Dzierwa’s strikeout rate did decline against more advanced hitters, and the batting average of his opponents improved. Still, these were great results, so much so that I’m surprised the Orioles left him at Double-A rather than giving him a few Triple-A starts to close out his season.
Dzierwa was a deserving selection to the All-Star Futures Game roster for the 2026 season. Future Orioles acquisition Anthony Eyanson was one of Dzierwa’s teammates for that game. They were reunited at Chesapeake for Eyanson’s final six starts of the season.
Prospect outlets took notice of the 6’8” lefty as the season went along, some more than others. The end-of-season MLB Pipeline prospect list has Dzierwa checking in at #86, the third-highest of five Orioles on that outlet’s top 100. The report sounds nice:
Dzierwa showed real ability to limit walks in college and can pinpoint his entire arsenal wherever he wants, pounding the strike zone and also working the edges well. … His foundation of size, two potentially plus pitches and command gives him one of the highest floors in the Orioles system as an almost surefire starter, with the development of a reliable breaking pitch determining whether that’s in the middle or the back-end of a big league rotation.
I am taking note that even an often-optimistic outlet like the MLB-owned Pipeline is not projecting out from Dzierwa’s minor league numbers that this is a future ace in the making. When you start to hear about a “high floor” that probably also doesn’t mean “high ceiling,” and in this case, Dzierwa doesn’t have the kind of fastball velocity that’s just going to blow away hitters, nor are they confident in his breaking arsenal enabling him to get such elite results against higher-end hitters.
This assessment is shared across other reports. At FanGraphs, where Dzierwa was the #12 player on their preseason-but-posted-in-May list, the main thing they take from him is that he is a lefty with good changeup command, a type of player who tends to be a good big leaguer. They’re not as big on his potential to go higher in a rotation, either, describing him as a “quick-moving no. 4/5 starter.” That kind of player doesn’t hit the top 100 there, where upside gets greater weight.
Among some of the warts that hold his ranking back for the FG evaluation are – like Pipeline – questions about the breaking pitch development, as well as thinking that Dzierwa doesn’t use his height to generate elite extension towards home, which would help his fastball velocity play higher than it actually is.
Talking about a no. 4/5 starter means you’re saying a guy who’s going to be as good as Dean Kremer. That doesn’t launch many prospect rockets into space. Dzierwa may start to look more like that as he faces Triple-A hitters and eventually MLB ones, but in the meantime… man. Batters facing Dzierwa this season batted a combined .186/.246/.289.
That’s dominant. You can’t hope for much better from any 22-year-old pitcher in his first full pro season, no matter what round he was drafted. Many teams are probably now wishing they had been paying closer attention to that 2025 Michigan State team. If you get a solid back-end-of-the-rotation guy with a second round pick, you’ve done very well for yourself. That’s why it was frustrating for many years when Elias wasn’t even trying to get pitching prospects in higher rounds.
Dzierwa is making a good case for why that should be done more often. Things could hardly have gone better for him this season. Hopefully, he has the opportunity to continue to show that quality by opening up at Triple-A in 2027.
