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There’s a common theme to 2025’s worst MLB teams, and it’s that they were pretty clearly going to have rough seasons. And yet, none of them did the things that would keep this from occurring. Three of those four squads have also fired their managers already — the Orioles being the latest thanks to getting rid of Brandon Hyde, following the Rockies and Pirates doing so a little earlier in May — because that’s one way to pretend you’re Doing Something about losses that have been brought about by an organizational-wide philosophy.
You can argue that the Orioles weren’t expected to be quite as bad in 2025 as they’ve been — they’re 15-30, on pace for 108 losses — but this is just arguing a matter of degrees. The O’s made it so that a whole lot of things had to go right for them to compete in 2025 like they did even a year ago when they won 91 games and lost in the Wild Card round, and none of those things have gone right. Instead, they’ve just hit the worst-case scenario in a few instances, but all within the realm of plausibility without the need for hindsight.
They spent more money this offseason under new owner David Rubenstein than they did under John Angelos, sure, bumping the Opening Day payroll from $93 million to $165 million, but that overstates what happened. A non-insignificant portion of that spending went to arbitration-eligible players that were already on the roster, like Adley Rutschman getting a bump from around the league minimum to $5.5 million — 12 of the Orioles’ players jumped from pre-arbitration years or to their second year of arbitration, all at once, heading into 2025. As far as actual acquisitions went, a couple of the most notables ones were the signing of Tyler O’Neill, an outfielder with more middling seasons than great ones, to a three-year, $49.5 million deal, and bringing in Charlie Morton for $15 million heading into his age-41 season, after a 2024 with the Braves that had plenty of warning signs in it even without bringing up his age.
The Orioles also moved the left field wall in again, which makes the Morton thing even odder, considering that two of his previous three years featured alarming spikes in his home run rate. And last, they let Corbin Burnes walk. Burnes posted a 2.92 ERA with the O’s in 2024 while throwing 194 innings. He finished fifth in the AL Cy Young vote while posting a 131 OPS+ that led the O’s rotation, and it wasn’t close, either. Baltimore had Burnes (131 ERA+) and Alberto Suárez (103), as above-average starters, with Grayson Rodriguez (99) nearly there, then things fell off a bit. Dean Kremer was a little less nearly there than Rodriguez (94), while Cole Irvin (79) and Cade Povich (74) got rocked. Zach Eflin was a quality midseason addition, but being in a situation where Zach Eflin is your number two starter is not ideal when the idea is ensuring a competitive rotation.
The Orioles signed 35-year-old Tomoyuki Sugano out of Japan for $13 million, and that’s worked out great so far, but it’s difficult not to look at the rotation and wonder why they didn’t get Sugano and Burnes as an upgrade over last year’s rotation, especially when they still had so much room under the luxury tax threshold. Povich has been just as terrible as last year. Kremer has been much worse, to Povich’s level. Morton was already moved to the bullpen to limit how much damage he could do. Kyle Gibson’s return to Baltimore has not gone well — not that his previous stint was much to be excited about. Rodriguez hasn’t pitched yet, as he’s on the 60-day IL with a lat strain.
The universal issue is home runs, of course: Sugano is giving up 1.5 per nine innings, and that’s the lowest among anyone Baltimore’s rotation regulars in 2025. Kremer has given up 1.8 per nine. Povich, 1.7. Morton a full two per nine, which has actually come down a little from when he was in the rotation. Eflin is at 1.9, and Gibson at 5.1 owing to seven long balls in 12-1/3 innings of work. Baltimore’s single-year park factor for home runs in 2025, per Savant, is a league-leading 169, way ahead of the Rogers Centre in Toronto (152), which itself is outpacing the rest of the league — Great American Ballpark is third, at 127. For lefties at Camden, the park factor for homers is 199.
This is all small sample stuff, of course, but it’s still noteworthy to look at a spike from the 2022-2024 era when the fences were pushed back before 2025’s bringing them back in and get a glimpse of what that distance was doing for Orioles’ pitchers. The three-year rolling average park factor for homers at Camden in 2024 was 93, 20th in the majors. This is a huge shift. And it’s only worked in one direction, too, as the Orioles’ offense has seen a 17 point drop in OPS+ since 2024. O’Neill is a pumpkin again, Rutschman’s offensive slide has gotten steeper, Ryan Mountcastle can’t quality contact all of a sudden, Heston Kjerstad isn’t hitting for average, he’s not walking enough to make up for it, and there’s no been no pop, either. Gunnar Henderson hasn’t been as much of a force as he was a year ago, when he posted a monster nine-WAR season powered by a 156 OPS+, but at least Jackson Holliday has turned things around in a major way both from 2024 and his early start this year.
The Orioles were basically built as if the rotation needed a little tweaking, as if the lineup would be just fine with every potentially worrisome issue from 2024 going away, as if Tyler O’Neill actually was that guy and not a 30-year-old with two real good campaigns against more mediocre ones. As if bringing in the fences would solve more issues than it would cause — as if they didn’t need Corbin Burnes. They’ve been wrong on every count, is the thing, and all this has done is reemphasize that criticizing the Orioles’ failure to push harder when they were at their best — when they were better earlier than expected, when they were a 100-win team that still had holes — as it was happening wasn’t some fearmongering. It was meant to be a reminder that things can go south in a hurry, just as unexpectedly and as quickly as the good things that were happening to them.
And Brandon Hyde, for some reason, is the only one who will face punishment for this. General manager Mike Elias has brought the Orioles a ton of pieces they needed to contend, yes, but he’s also made wrong decisions when it comes to both action and inaction for years now, and Baltimore finds itself on pace for well over 100 losses right now, again, because of it. Elias has been in charge of the O’s since 2019. They had lost 115 games in 2018, and his first squad dropped 108, then 110 in the next full season of 2021. Baltimore went 83-79 in 2022, the ahead-of-schedule campaign, won 101 games in 2023, 91 in 2024, and are now on pace for 108 losses again in 2025. The situation they find themselves in is completely fixable, but whether Elias is the guy capable of fixing it, given his track record for anything besides getting promising kids to the majors, is very much up for debate.
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