Orioles Option Dylan Bundy to Bowie

Have you been dreaming about having Dylan Bundy make the Opening Day roster? Your dream will have to wait for another year, because as of this morning, he has been optioned from Bowie, which would seem to rule him out from making the big league roster out of spring training.

Todd Redmond, acquired off waivers from the Reds over the offseason, was also optioned. Redmond will be headed to Norfolk, and probably the only people who really care about that are related to him.

While Bundy hasn't spawned a site like Matt Wieters Facts, there's still been plenty of hype about him, as if sometimes people are expecting him to throw 98 mph every pitch while striking out 27 batters per game. He is the #2 prospect in the game, according to Baseball America. That's exciting stuff, but it doesn't mean that he's ready for MLB when he is 20 years old and has a total of 105.1 innings of professional baseball under his belt.

Though his spring ERA is an excellent 1.13, we shouldn't confuse that for Bundy pitching well. He's walked six in 8 innings against largely AAA-caliber competition. Our limited exposure to radar gun readings suggests his velocity may be off by a couple of miles per hour and his command is certainly off. After his last couple of outings, Bundy himself has said that he is trying to get back to the mechanics he had in high school.

Any time you start talking about problems with mechanics, that sounds like a good thing to solve in the minors and it probably means Bundy is not ready to be up in the show for good. We can probably guess that Bundy has many sessions with Rick Peterson in his future until he gets back on track. We can certainly hope that Bundy is so good he's bound to get back on track. We've heard a little about the mechanics issue after he had missed a couple of games with a groin strain. Whether there's a connection there is something we can only speculate unless we hear something from one of the principal figures.

Bundy and Redmond being optioned leaves the Orioles with 49 players in camp, including 14 non-roster invitees and approximately one million starting rotation candidates.

One of those players still in camp is Kevin Gausman, and if you need me, I'll be over here swooning over that change-up he threw to strike out Luke Scott in Thursday afternoon's game.