Free agent Michael Lorenzen has primarily been a pitcher in his career but has occasionally dabbled in hitting and playing the outfield. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reports that Lorenzen and his agent, Ryan Hamill of CAA, are pitching him as a two-way player for the upcoming season. However, the idea isn’t really to sell Lorenzen as a viable hitter, but to get around the roster rules that limit how many pitchers a team can have.
Major League Baseball instituted a rule in June of 2022 limiting clubs to 13 pitchers on a 26-man roster. When rosters expand to 28 in September, the pitcher limit goes up to 14. As part of these rules, each player is designated as a pitcher or a hitter or a two-way player. In the case of a two-way player, they don’t count against that pitcher limit. For instance, the Angels were able to carry Shohei Ohtani and 13 other pitchers on their roster during his time with that club, giving them one extra arm compared to all other teams. The Dodgers will be able to do the same in 2025 and beyond, after Ohtani didn’t pitch this year while recovering from Tommy John surgery.
To qualify for two-way status, a player needs to have met certain criteria. They need to have pitched at least 20 innings and have played 20 games as a position player or designated hitter, getting at least three plate appearances in those games, in either the current season or the previous one. The status allows the club to get around the roster limitations, as well as the rules on when a position player can pitch.
The plan from Lorenzen and his agent, as laid out by Rosenthal, is to let Lorenzen get the necessary plate appearances this year in order to qualify for two-way status. Once he has that status, it would be in place for the remainder of 2025 and in 2026 as well.
It’s a creative plan which would theoretically increase Lorenzen’s value. In this day and age, pitcher usage has been shrinking, with starters getting pulled earlier and relievers taking up larger workloads. Having one extra arm would certainly appeal to a club, so it’s understandable with Lorenzen and his reps would give it a try.
The challenge would be in implementation. Lorenzen wasn’t an especially good hitter even when he was doing it regularly. With the Reds from 2015 to 2019, he got between five and 53 plate appearances each year, getting to 145 in total over those five seasons. He hit seven home runs but only walked at a 4.8% rate and struck out 31.7% of the time. His .235/.279/.432 line led to an 84 wRC+, which is not too bad for a pitcher but still subpar. It’s also mostly buoyed by a four-homer burst in 34 plate appearances in 2018. He stepped to the plate 53 times in 2019 but went deep just once and slashed .208/.283/.313 for a wRC+ of 53.
Even getting to something in that vicinity is probably a tall ask. Lorenzen got exactly one plate appearance in both 2020 and 2021, followed by none at all in the past three seasons, so we’re talking about a guy who essentially hasn’t hit at all in five years and is turning 33 years old in January.
But the way the plan is outlined, that doesn’t seem to matter. The idea is for a rebuilding club such as the White Sox or Marlins to run Lorenzen out there, knowing full well he isn’t likely to hit much, but presumably not caring since they’re not really trying to win anyway. Once he has unlocked two-way player status, he can be traded to a contender that would benefit from having another pitcher on the roster.
It’s perhaps worth noting that this plan could theoretically be done with any pitcher, though a theoretical hurler might not be keen on the idea. A random free agent pitcher might not want to embarrass himself by stepping up the plate in those 20 games, and there’s also the risk of suffering an injury on a stray pitch hitting a hand or some kind of strain while running the bases or sliding into a bag. Lorenzen at least has the potential to be somewhat passable in the box and it’s possible he welcomes the challenge of getting back in there.
Lorenzen has been utilized more as a pitcher because his results have been better on the mound, and he would have value even just as a standard hurler. He has a 3.99 earned run average in 854 1/3 innings at this point, working as a starter, reliever or swingman over his career. He has signed one-year deals in each of the past three offseasons, just based on his abilities on the mound. He got $6.8MM from the Angels going into 2022, $8.5MM from the Tigers going into 2023 and $4.5MM from the Rangers last offseason. He just posted a 3.31 ERA this year between the Rangers and Royals and would presumably be able to get another solid one-year pact in the coming weeks or months.
The hope from Lorenzen and his reps seems to be that this unorthodox idea could perhaps get him a bit more money or maybe a second year on his next deal. It’s unclear whether any club would have the appetite for such a strategy, however. In the age of expanded playoffs and the draft lottery, very few clubs are going into the 2025 season with no hope of contending. Even clubs that have been bad in recent seasons like the Angels and Athletics have been aggressively adding to their rosters this winter.
The White Sox just had a record-setting season of futility and are surely going to be bad again in 2025, but intentionally tanking a lineup spot to gain some theoretical marginal boost in trade value might be a bit too egregious for a club that probably has some desire for a less embarrassing season next year. It’d also take some at-bats from younger players the team would like to develop.
Rosenthal scoffs at the idea of the White Sox or Marlins having young players that they want to give big league at-bats to, but that’s oddly dismissive. Surely the Fish would have to weigh a plan like this against trying out various players they hope can become viable major leaguers, such as Kyle Stowers, Griffin Conine, Deyvison De Los Santos and so on. Even if they feel they have DH at-bats to use, they could go the more traditional route of just signing a free agent hitter such as Jesse Winker or Tommy Pham with the idea of trading that player at the deadline.
Time will tell if any club will bite, but one has to tip their cap to Lorenzen and his reps for thinking outside the box.
