The Orioles announced that they have claimed outfielder Marco Luciano off waivers from the Pirates, a move which was previously reported. To open a 40-man spot, outfielder Jhonkensy Noel has been designated for assignment. The O’s also announced that left-hander Josh Walker, who was designated for assignment last month, has cleared waivers and been sent to Triple-A Norfolk.
Noel, 24, was just claimed off waivers two days ago. It may seem strange to acquire a player and then immediately cut him from the roster but this sequence of events is becoming more common in baseball and the Orioles are one of the more aggressive teams in attempting it. The ideal outcome for the team is that the player eventually clears waivers and stays in the organization as depth without taking up a roster spot.
Baltimore fans should be familiar with the upside of the move. The O’s acquired Ryan O’Hearn from the Royals in January of 2023. He was designated for assignment two days later and cleared waivers. A few months after that, he hit his way back onto the roster and was a productive member of the club for over two years.
Up until he was claimed by the Orioles, Noel had spent his entire career with the Guardians. With that club, he has shown huge power potential but also a poor approach at the plate. He has 351 big league plate appearances to this point with 19 home runs but his 4.8% walk rate and 32.8% strikeout rate are both awful numbers. Despite the long balls, he has a .193/.242/.401 batting line and 79 wRC+, indicating he’s been 21% worse than the league average hitter.
He exhausted his final option season in 2025, which has pushed him into fringe roster territory. The Guards nudged him off and the O’s scooped him up. He’s now back into DFA limbo again, which can last as long as a week. The waiver process takes 48 hours, so the O’s could field trade interest for the next five days, but the Guards weren’t able to line up a trade in the previous weeks. Most likely, Noel will be back on the waiver wire.
Despite the rough major league results, he could draw interest from the raw power and also his better minor league numbers. Over the past two years, he has stepped to the plate 536 times at Triple-A. His 7.5% walk rate and 23.7% strikeout rate at that level are still not great but much closer to average. That’s helped him put up a .285/.349/.538 line and 130 wRC+.
If some other club scoops him up, Noel has just over a year of big league service time. That means he can be controlled for five full seasons and is still two years away from an arbitration raise. If he clears waivers, the O’s can keep him. Since he doesn’t have three years of service nor a previous career outright, he doesn’t have the right to reject an outright assignment.
The situation with Walker is somewhat similar. The O’s claimed him off waivers from the Phillies in August. The O’s then signed him to a major league deal in November. Salary terms of that pact haven’t been reported but it presumably pays Walker something slightly above the $780K league minimum, since he still hasn’t qualified for arbitration.
He was designated for assignment two days later. Like with the O’Hearn and Noel situations, the O’s were hoping Walker would clear waivers and stick with the club in a non-roster capacity. It didn’t work initially, as Atlanta claimed him. But that club designated him for assignment a few weeks later, which allowed the Orioles to claim him back. The O’s then tried again, designating Walker for assignment once more on December 19th.
DFA limbo normally only lasts a week at most, but there are different rules around the holidays, so Walker lingered in the ether for a few weeks. Today, he finally has clarity on his status. While he probably isn’t glad to lose his roster spot, he now at least knows which spring training location he’ll be reporting to.
Walker will try to win in the Baltimore bullpen at some point in 2026. His major league track record isn’t amazing, as he has a 6.59 earned run average in 27 1/3 innings. However, he just posted some intriguing minor league numbers in 2025. Split between the Blue Jays, Phillies and Orioles, he logged 42 2/3 Triple-A frames. His 4.64 ERA in that sample isn’t too exciting but he struck out 24.1% of batters faced and got grounders on 52.1% of balls in play.
Photo courtesy of Ken Blaze, Imagn Images
Yo come on Orioles…
The O’s are Grinches.
No way my king got DFA’d again smh
Yeah trying to sneak guys through waivers hoping to assign them to the minors.
getting passed around like bonnie blue
Get off only fans
I mean…you knew who he was talking about lmao
Yes, I imagine that’s what one does when visiting that site.
Or Justin Beiber at Usherland.
Damn. Letting go of a superstar, and the catalyst for several future championships. Dem Oreos could’ve been a dynasty, hon. What could’ve been…
One hand doesn’t know what the other one is doing. 🤣
I always wonder what that’s like for a player. Noel is on the Guardians one day, the next with the Orioles, a few days later released and waiting to hear if he’s on his third team in a matter of days. Gotta be a little frustrating. Think anyone from the Orioles organization called him up in the last few days to say welcome aboard?
sabe – Baseball is a bidness, many players know they could be gone at any moment. The benefits still outweigh the drawbacks though.
His agent will likely have told him that the Orioles do this all the time and he probably shouldn’t even waste a second thinking of himself as an Oriole.
I’m still curious what the procedure is. Odds are yes, he heard from his agent but I’d still like to know if it’s customary for someone in the organization to give a welcome call.
But I also suppose a better question I should ask is at what point do players like this just nod their heads and accept they are essentially career AAAA players.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making fun of these guys, my baseball career ended in high school as a backup catcher with a sub .200 batting average. I envy any ballplayer. As FPG implied above, that life sounds a lot more interesting than punching a clock. Just curious of the mindset.
I think they have a one page generic flyer telling the player not to sign a lease yet until they make it through the DFA to Norfolk.
kind of like the joke with “cash considerations” the “player” that moves so often between teams he only has a bag with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. he’s a DH so he doesn’t need any equipment except for a bat..
It would be SUCH a Guards move to bring Noel back and pat themselves on the back for addressing their need for a power righty OF bat.
Lololol. Please don’t give them any ideas… Offense is bad enough already!!!
No Christmas in O-Town
If he doesn’t get claimed they will love to have him at AAA
What a weird dfa move
When you see something like this, it is almost always that the player was aquired simply to try to slip him through waivers. If he clears, they can stash him at AAA as a depth piece.
I get that but I was surprised Noel was the claim over luciano
In a few days the Orioles will DFA Luciano too. It’s a viable method to stockpile depth players at AAA without having to use a 40-man spot. It’s a smart way to build depth.
I assume that Luciano will also be DFA’d in the coming days.
There’s no real rhyme to reason why you pick one player over another in this strategy. You can’t easily predict what players get cut from other teams. It’s not like fantasy baseball, where you just compare the best player available against each other, to build your roster. This strat literally is about the AAA roster. So it’s about stockpiling as many borderline MLB talent as possible at AAA.
There goes Christmas in Heaven by Monty Python as his walk up song.
This time of year most front offices have a lot of moving parts.
Some have rosters starting to get more set, and only a few roster slots left to play with. Other teams are busy divvying up their resources handling arbitration negotiations, which can get sensitive and drag out all month or more. And these days, there’s a lot of premium free agents still being negotiated. The Os are betting that from all that noise, there’s an opportunity to slip low risk/high reward plays guys thru the waiver. They didn’t invent this strategy. Some teams do it better than others. But kudos to them because you see it more from rebuilding/retooling clubs, not teams in “win now.”
I hope Noel stays with the Os more than Luciano. There’s a reason the Giants and Pirates let him go.
They need to put a stop to this type of roster manipulation. It doesn’t do any good at all for the players.
@hiflew
less regulation. let’s let the Invisible Hand of the Market sort it out. these players who have exhausted their options can stop the madness with some more success on the field.
Congratulations to Ryan O’Hearn for making it happen. couldn’t have happened to a better guy.
I was thinking about this the other day.. players should get a nominal payment every time they are claimed. Just a little something for the hassle.
Or have their big league salary guaranteed once they are claimed. Might not be as bad to be in the minors in a new organization if you are getting $800k to do it.
It’s not about the money. It’s about adding, sneaking thru the waiver in a busy month for FOs, and stashing as much possible MLB talent at AAA. They’re trying to build depth that will be needed at some point in June, July, Aug.
The Os depth was extremely tested last year. They had to call up, for something like 70+ injured players. The logistics of that is crazy. That’s almost two 40-man rosters they had to cover.
The lack of a salary floor and salary cap very likely has more influence on roster decisions than this miniscule manipulation of AAAA-type players. No foul on the play here.
🎵 I’ll have a blue Christmas without you…
I’ll be so blue just thinking about you… 🎵
Porky did the best version.
They claimed him just to fire him?
If he clears waivers, he can be assigned to the minors without taking a roster spot.
I think Elias gets a bonus for the # of transactions performed at this point, not for what they are.
Noel has an A+ nickname in “Big Christmas.” I wish he was better disciplined at the plate.
Wake op Colorado and say Feliz Navidad.
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?
“Big Christmas” got cut before Christmas and after New Year’s! At least they respected the holidays.
honestly feels like the Orioles and Pirates both would had been better off swapping Luciano and Noel. that seems like better fits respectively
I’m hoping the Guardians claim him to keep this circus going around.
Wouldn’t that be not just funny but in a way right and proper. There’s a much better opportunity for Big Christmas staying with Cleveland, owners of one of the worst outfields in this last decade or any decade for that matter. And as bad as they are they’re even worse on the RHH side — his big competition is David Fry and Johnathan Rodriguez. On the O’s it’s the Polar Bear, Ward, O’Neill, Mountcastle and Coby Mayo.
I don’t get this one. I defended Baltimore’s right to nab Santander years ago via the Rule 5 draft, no matter his post surgical status, because his upside was just too tempting to pass up on. And the new opportunity benefited the player more. Not so here.
I will say the whole carousel of DFA’ing players is pretty ridiculous. My O’s abuse the system a lot, but you do feel for the players who keep getting yanked back and forth between organizations. I imagine most of them are looking for an opportunity and stability but they just find themselves in limbo over and over again.
This is the life of most pro ball players. We pay attention to the guys at MLB, some of them stars. But the vast majority go thru their arb clocks, and grind thru years of some version of this. It’s great to see players succeed, but it’s also what they signed up for. That’s the big gamble they’re making.
I have a lot of respect for these guys, who figure out how to be professionals, gamers and productive, while also never having perfect conditions to succeed. This is a hard game, for these life context reasons too.
Hopefully they find a way to keep him but this is classic Orioles under elias.
Okay this time is Korea
I am not sure if players can put in their contracts the option for another year of being optioned. I know no player wants to be optioned, but changing teams 7 times might not be best