Félix Bautista is finally close. The 31-year-old right-hander, still known around Camden Yards as "The Mountain," will start a rehab assignment with Double-A Chesapeake on Sunday before moving up to Triple-A Norfolk for the following week, he told reporters in the Orioles clubhouse before Friday night's game with the Tampa Bay Rays.
At least, that is the plan for Bautista who is attempting to come back from a plague of arm and shoulder injuries. It's a real signal that a big-league return before the season ends is within reach.
It's been a brutal stretch to get here. Bautista tore his rotator cuff and labrum last July throwing a weighted ball in the bullpen, as the Baltimore Sun reported, needing surgery last August and a recovery timeline the team pegged at roughly a year. That's now.
And this injury came on the heels of an entirely different one: Tommy John surgery in October 2023 wiped out his whole 2024 season, meaning Bautista has now battled back from two separate major arm surgeries in three years. He did return for a strong 2025 in between — a 2.60 ERA with 19 saves over 34.2 innings — before the shoulder issue ended that season early too.
None of it has come close to erasing what made Bautista one of the most feared closers in baseball to begin with. In 2023, he struck out 110 batters over 61 innings with a 1.48 ERA and 33 saves, a season that earned him an All-Star nod and the Mariano Rivera American League Reliever of the Year Award. His velocity hasn't fully come back — he touched 103 mph that year and has topped out around 100 since — but he's said his focus right now is simply staying healthy long enough to find out what's left, not chasing the radar gun.
The timing works in his favor. Baltimore has been without closer Ryan Helsley since late June with elbow inflammation, and Tyler Wells, who'd stepped into the ninth-inning role in the meantime, was traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline. A healthy Bautista would slot back into that opening about as cleanly as it gets, though while manager Craig Albernaz said this week that Bautista has "checked all the boxes" so far in his buildup, he stressed the team isn't going to rush him.
It remains to be seen how Bautista performs in his rehab stints, and it's conceivable he could appear in low leverage situations to start with should he return to the Orioles, though he's certainly proven capable of handling closing duties.
Bautista signed with Baltimore as a minor-league free agent back in 2016 after being let go by the Marlins, spent three seasons in rookie ball, and didn't debut in the majors until 2022 — inheriting the closer's role once the Orioles moved on from Jorge López that summer.