Dan Straily chose the Orioles as his late-spring free agency destination in part because of the opportunity presented here to step right into a starting rotation and the data-informed environment the organization seeks to foster under executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias and his top deputy, assistant general manager for analytics Sig Mejdal.
With the Houston Astros, an organization at the cutting edge of so much of baseball's nascent pitching technology boom, Elias and Mejdal helped build a team at the bottom of the league into a World Series champion. Straily spent some time in Houston, and has long been an acolyte of such methods.