“We need to dramatically improve our pitching, I don’t think there’s any question about that,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said in October during his end-of-season news conference. “Our starting rotation simply wasn’t good enough this year to compete. … If you look at the whole season, there’s no question that we have to acquire more pitching, better pitching this winter. I think that’ll be the No. 1 priority because, said simply, that was the downfall of this season was that our rotation was short, and we weren’t effective enough in terms of run prevention.”
