Former Orioles pitcher Zack Britton announced his retirement from baseball on Nov. 20, formally ending an esteemed career that saw him reach a regular-season peak as high as any reliever of the 21st century.
Britton was a member of the Orioles organization from 2006-2018, finding a niche as a dominant closer in 2014 that earned him a pair of back-to-back All-Star nods in the following years.
Britton is now recognized as one of the great Orioles in recent history, a closer dominant enough to receive attention in Cy Young voting. But before he learned how to sit the league down on three swinging strikes with his trademark sinker, he first had to carve out a role for himself at a major league level.
“You start out with having all this success in the minors and you’re like, ‘Man, I’m going to go to the big leagues and I’m just going to continue doing what I had done,'” Britton said on Glenn Clark Radio Nov. 29. “My last two years of starting in the minors had gone really well. … The big leagues, it’s just a rude awakening.”
Britton spent his first three years as an Oriole as a replacement-level starter, recording a 4.77 ERA and 1.516 WHIP from 2011-2013. He hit a wall in that third year as a then-25-year-old with a 4.95 ERA across eight games and seven starts.
“In hindsight, I just didn’t have the ability to make adjustments throughout an outing like good starters do,” he said. “Like if you don’t have your good stuff, you can go to something else. I had decent off-speed stuff … but I didn’t really have anything else if my sinker wasn’t there, and my command wasn’t great enough to just get through five or six innings.”
The following spring, the team sat Britton down and explained its plan to put him in the bullpen. He still offered potential, and some pitchers find themselves suited best in a relief role.
Britton was a changed pitcher in 2014 with 37 saves across 76.1 innings pitched, nearly doubling last year’s workload in an entirely new role. His ERA+ had spent the last few years hovering between 90 and 80, but shot up to 240 to couple with his 1.65 ERA.
Britton did it by leaning into his sinker, a pitch he’d learned years earlier, throwing it 90.7 percent of the time and sidelining the four-seam fastball completely, according to Baseball Savant.
“I learned [the sinker] in Aberdeen from Calvin Maduro, who was my pitching coach,” Britton said. “He was trying to teach me a cutter, and it obviously did the exact opposite of what you want a cutter to do. The catcher at the time … was like, ‘What the heck are you throwing?’ I was like, ‘I’m trying to throw a cutter.’ He was like, ‘Well, it’s not cutting, it’s sinking, but that’s pretty good.’ From there, it just evolved.”
Britton rode the pitch into 2015, nearly recreating the prior year’s success to the tune of his first All-Star appearance, but no one was prepared for what came next.
Britton’s 2016 campaign instantly went down as one of the best seasons any closer has ever had. His 0.54 ERA, 803 ERA+ and 47 saves are some of the best marks of any pitcher in decades, and baseball writers recognized his efforts with a fourth-place AL Cy Young finish.
His velocity ticked up out of the bullpen, but so did the movement on the pitch. From 2014-2016, he was untouchable from his perch, having mastered one of the most devastating single pitches in recent memory.
“In [2014], the players I had played against on opposing teams came up to me like, ‘Dude, what happened? Where did you figure that out? It starts here, it goes here, I can’t hit this.’ I’m talking guys like Miguel Cabrera, David Ortiz, guys that pretty much owned me when I was a starter,” Britton said.
His 2017 season lacked those same video-game numbers as he battled forearm tightness, but he still finished with 15 saves before rupturing his right Achilles tendon come wintertime. He was traded to the New York Yankees midway through the following year. He pitched in New York through 2022, then remained a free agent throughout 2023 before calling it quits.
Britton, a near-lock for the Orioles Hall of Fame, won’t forget the role Baltimore held in his mighty ascent.
“Being drafted out of high school, 18 years old, coming into the Orioles organization, the state of Maryland has just felt like home for me,” he said. “I’ve been to all these little towns in Maryland playing in the minors, meeting all these different people, so Maryland always felt like home.”
For more from Britton, listen to the full interview here:
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