Turning any baseball player from a position player to a pitcher, or the other way around, is a long shot in the best of cases. The Orioles were trying to pull this off with Cuban ex-outfielder Dariel Alvarez, who couldn’t really hit enough to make it in MLB but had a great arm in the outfield.
The Baltimore Sun’s Peter Schmuck reported on Wednesday that Alvarez’s conversion has been derailed by a familiar foe for pitchers: Elbow soreness, with Tommy John surgery expected to be the only solution. Alvarez had been assigned to Low-A Delmarva and never even managed to make it onto the mound there.