In their six wins , the O’s look like offensive juggernauts. In most of their nine defeats, they look like one of the worst lineups in the league. Will the real Orioles please stand up?
The Orioles have struggled all around throughout their first 15 games, limping to a 6-9 record. That the pitching staff has the second-worst starter ERA in baseball is not all that surprising. However, the sheer mediocrity of this offense is hard to ignore amidst the Orioles’ overarching struggles.
This team was clearly constructed to win games by putting up offensive numbers that most other squads can’t keep pace with. Singing veteran inning-eaters like Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano and Kyle Gibson is a more defensible strategy when you expect a lineup led by Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and friends to put up 5+ runs/game.
The Orioles’ offense has been staggeringly inconsistent, though. The Baltimore bats currently rank 16th in batting average, 15th in HRs, 15th in slugging percentage and 21st in on-base percentage—all the markers of a truly average offense. However, that mediocrity is not the result of a consistently middling team, but one that swings wildly from their good days to their bad days.
In wins this season, the O’s are hitting .313 with a .936 OPS while putting up 7.8 runs/game. In losses, those numbers drop to a .179 average, .501 OPS and 2.1 runs/game. In seven of the Orioles’ nine losses, they’ve scored three runs or fewer.
It’s natural for teams to perform significantly worse in losses, but the Orioles’ dropoff is particularly extreme. The normal gap across the MLB this season is a 76-point drop in average and a 245-point drop in OPS between wins and losses. The Orioles’ average drops by 134 points between wins and losses, while their OPS dips by 335 points.
Their lows are also lower than normal, as their average in losses is 17 points lower than the MLB average in losses (.196) and their OPS in defeats is 68 points lower than across the rest of the league (.569). This start to the season also represents a significant drop off from 2024, when the O’s hit .203 in losses with a .569 OPS and scored 2.8 runs/game.
The lows are lower so far in 2025, and pinpointing the exact cause of these drastic splits isn’t simple. If you look at the seven losses where the O’s scored three runs or less, the only trend that stands out is opponents’ reliance on four-seam fastballs. Pitchers like Garrett Crochet and Kevin Gausman each threw four-seamers on at least 50% of their pitches, while five of the seven starters threw fastballs on more than 25% of their pitches.
While pitchers relying on their fastball isn’t an innovative strategy, it exploits an obvious deficiency with the current Orioles hitters. Of the Orioles’ top 10 hitters, six are hitting below the Mendoza Line against opposing heaters, with Ryan Mountcastle (.077) and Jordan Westburg (.125) particularly struggling. We’ve still seen the stars of the lineup—namely Gunnar Henderson (.400), Cedric Mullins (.357) and Adley Rutschman (.352)—handle fastballs without issue. However, clearly their success doesn’t give the depth this Orioles’ lineup needs.
Struggling against fastballs speaks to a certain amount of indecision at the plate. Most major league hitters say they go into their ABs looking for a fastball to hit, and then try to adjust to deal with a pitcher’s secondary offerings. This level of struggle against four-seamers could mean the O’s are between pitches—trying to sit on both a fastball and an off-speed pitch—or that they can’t pull the trigger when they get the heater they’re looking for.
Baltimore is also currently suffering from a certain lack of discipline, especially in defeat. The O’s are currently 24th in walk rate at 7.5%. That number that drops 6.4% in losses, the same walk rate the league-worst Texas Rangers have across all their games.
While the Orioles tend to hover around mediocre in terms of swing decisions (18th in strikeout rate, 12th in swing and miss rate), that aspect of their plate discipline also seems to disappear in losses. Their strikeout rate goes from 20.7% in wins to a worrying 27.7% in defeats. That 27.7% mark would trail only the 3-12 Rockies for the worst mark in baseball.
Perhaps part of the large swings in offensive production can be blamed on Brandon Hyde’s constant tinkering with the lineup. In the Orioles’ two-game set with the Blue Jays, Hyde used the same lineup in back-to-back games for the first time all season. Those two games were also the first time all season the O’s have scored 5+ runs in back-to-back games. Some may call that causation, while others say coincidence. Yet it’s often felt like the manager’s frequent insistence on “playing the matchups” has also meant frequently leaving Baltimore with one or more of its best nine on the bench.
As is often the case in baseball, part of these early-season inconsistencies can be attributed to luck and a small sample size. The O’s are currently fourth in hard-hit rate and 5th in barrel rate, meaning they’re making excellent contact on average when they do hit the ball. They’ve also experienced a significant amount of unlucky breaks, as they rank 7th and 6th in expected batting average and expected slugging percentage, suggesting a lot of their hard-hit balls are being turned into outs at an unsustainable rate.
The optimist would also say that we should treat this early stretch as somewhat of an extended spring training, with this group of Orioles hitters still trying to coalesce into the best version of this lineup. After all, Gunnar Henderson only played in eight of the first 15 games, Colton Cowser missed all but four of them and Jackson Holliday and Heston Kjerstad are still trying to define their roles in the order. There’s still time for this order to morph into one of the AL’s best— even if most fans are already tired of hearing “there’s still plenty of time to improve” as an excuse for the poor start.
Since the introduction of the third Wild Card spot in 2022, the average American League playoff team has posted 92 wins per season. Given the current state of the pitching staff, the Orioles would need to average about 5.2 runs/game to have a shot at 92+ wins. That number may very well be in reach, but not if this level of offensive volatility continues.