Back late in the 2018 calender year, when O’s left-hander John Means went to Premiere Pitching Performance facility in St. Louis, he met Forrest Herrmann, who was then Premiere’s director of pitching development.

The work Means did at that facility led to his fastball gaining velocity and his changeup developing into a real quality pitch. That work helped Means become an All-Star, an Opening Day starter and a top MLB pitcher.

A few years later, one of those he had worked with there, Herrmann, would be hired by the Orioles.

On the latest edition of the Steve on Baseball podcast I talked with Herrmann, who is now the Orioles’ director of pitching development. He oversees the pitching in their farm system.

We got into numerous farm pitching topics in some depth and discussed this vital role for the Orioles. Every organization is looking to develop quality young pitchers and the while the O’s have not used high draft picks under Mike Elias on pitching, they have several promising pitching prospects.

But it has also been a year when several of those pitchers on the farm have gotten hurt and we discussed that as well with Herrmann.

In fact, since we recorded this interview a little over a week ago at High-A Aberdeen, more pitchers have hit the injured list on the farm. Just last Friday, Double-A Chesapeake put three pitchers on the IL. They were Braxton Bragg with a right forearm strain, Trace Bright with a right forearm strain and Levi Wells with right shoulder inflammation.

Tough day at Double-A as three members of their rotation hit the IL. The Baysox have had the best pitching on the farm this year, ranking fifth in the Eastern League in team ERA while Aberdeen is seventh. But both Triple-A Norfolk and Low-A Delmarva are near the bottom of their respective leagues.

Developing pitching is hard.

But the organizations that do it the best usually go on to win in the big leagues. In this podcast we talked about this vital topic of developing pitching.

Before joining the Orioles, Herrmann was a pitching strategist for the Seattle Mariners in 2019 and for the next two years worked in the minors for the Cincinnati Reds.

With Baltimore, Herrmann was pitching coach at Aberdeen in 2022, at Bowie in 2023, then was their low-level pitching coordinator on the farm in 2024 and he was named the O’s director of pitching development in November of 2024.

Herrmann also provides some input ahead of the draft each year on pitchers the O’s are looking at and we discussed that topic as well on this podcast.

If you follow the O’s farm, I think you’ll be interested in this interview.

And in the bigs

This one was both hard to believe and hard to take.

The O’s opened an 8-0 lead on Tampa Bay in the second inning last night and went on to lose to the Rays 12-8.

This was as bad as it gets.

In scoring eight in the second, the first nine O’s batters went 6-for-8 with a walk and three homers.

But the O’s remarkably went 0-for-23 the rest of the game.

Staked to an 8-0 lead, starter Trevor Rogers could get just seven outs. The O’s bullpen, so good for so long, had a meltdown, allowing nine runs in 5 2/3 innings.

The O’s will somehow try to regroup and win tonight to split a four-game series.

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