The Orioles' biggest hole is not where you think.

Seventy-nine and eighty-two. Fourth in the division, eighteen and a half back, and a second straight year of a rebuild that was supposed to be finished by now.

I went into this one with a list of things I was sure about. Most of them held. One of them fell apart completely, and the way it fell apart changes what I think the Orioles should do this winter. I’ll take them in order, and I’ll flag the one I got wrong when we get to it.

Here is the number that should frame everything you think about the 2026 bullpen. Félix Bautista threw one and two-thirds innings. Ryan Helsley threw fifteen and a third. Seventeen innings, combined, from the two men the season was built around.

And the bullpen was still good. Tyler Wells posted a 2.38 ERA with a 0.90 WHIP. Rico García threw 67 innings across 75 appearances with a 0.97 WHIP. Yennier Cano came back with a 2.90. Josh Walker, a thirty-one-year-old nobody drafted a parade for, gave them thirty innings at 2.08.

That is a genuinely good relief corps assembled almost entirely from men who were not the plan.

Pete Alonso did what Pete Alonso does: 43 home runs, an .885 OPS over 700 plate appearances, and by Statcast’s expected numbers he was better than that line, not worse. His expected wOBA of .402 against an actual .379 says the contact quality was even stronger than the results.

The genuine surprise was Blaze Alexander. A .772 OPS in 289 plate appearances from a utility infielder is real value at a position where most teams are running out an automatic out.

And the third-base tandem worked. Coby Mayo hit 24 home runs with a .758 OPS at twenty-four and improved on his 2025. Christian Encarnación-Strand posted an .838 in 213 plate appearances.

This is the one that rewards looking past the back of the card, and it inverts the obvious reading.

Brandon Young led the rotation with a 3.56 ERA. His expected ERA was 4.32, the worst mark on the staff. Sixty-one walks in 156 innings is not a foundation; it is a tightrope he happened not to fall off.

Trevor Rogers ran the opposite way. A 4.03 ERA that looks ordinary, sitting on a 1.18 WHIP, 157 strikeouts against 39 walks, and a 3.60 expected ERA. He was the best starter they had, and the number on the scoreboard hid it.

Dean Kremer is the same story in miniature: a 4.68 ERA against a 4.15 expected, undone mostly by 18 home runs in 90 innings.

And here is why that matters more than a trivia point: Trevor Rogers is a free agent. The Orioles are most likely losing him.

A 4.03 ERA is what the rest of baseball sees on his page too, which means whichever club signs him is buying a 3.60-xERA starter at a fourth-starter price. The Orioles are not just letting their best starter walk. They are letting him walk at a discount they created by not looking past the ERA themselves.

If the winter plan is built off ERA, they will pay to keep the wrong arm and watch someone else get the right one cheap.

An outfield OPS of .657, twenty-ninth of thirty, against a league median of .717. Not one Oriole outfielder with 150 plate appearances cleared a .710 OPS. Taylor Ward took 607 plate appearances and slugged .311. Leody Taveras took 482 and posted a .633.

You cannot win with this. No team does.

I want to be careful here, because the lazy version of this claim is wrong.

Some young Orioles improved. Coby Mayo went from a .687 OPS to .758. Samuel Basallo went from .559 to .697 at twenty-one. Adley Rutschman rebounded from .673 to .741.

But look at what happened to the players the organization spent the most to acquire:

Gunnar Henderson has now declined in three consecutive seasons, from ages twenty-three to twenty-five, through the years a hitter is supposed to be arriving rather than leaving. His expected numbers say he was somewhat unlucky, a .246 expected average against a .226 actual, but unlucky does not explain a 178-point OPS fall over two years.

The pattern is not “young players get worse here.” It is narrower and more worrying than that: the players who arrived with the highest expectations regressed, and the ones who arrived quietly improved. That is a development question, and it points somewhere uncomfortable.

I was certain about this one. An outfield that hits like that, I assumed, must also be giving away outs in the field. It would explain a lot, and it fit the story I already believed.

It is not true.

By Outs Above Average, the Orioles’ outfield finished -2, fifteenth of thirty. Dead average. And Colton Cowser posted +10 OAA in center, one of the better defensive seasons by any outfielder in baseball.

The defensive problem the Orioles do have is somewhere else. Dylan Beavers was -9 in left, the worst mark on the team, and he is also the outfielder whose bat went backwards. He is the one position player where both arrows point down.

I said last time that I could not answer the manager question from a spreadsheet. So I pulled every lineup card and every pitching change from all 166 games, and there is an answer in there. It is not about tactics. It is about who gets the job.

Start with the batting order.

Taylor Ward hit .670 and batted in the top four essentially every day, in four different slots all season. Colton Cowser hit better than Ward and was used in all nine batting-order positions.

The obvious objection is that churn follows slumps: a struggling hitter gets moved down, so instability is the manager reacting rather than the manager causing. That objection is why the table is sorted by production. It does not survive it. Ward was the worse hitter and kept the stable premium job. Henderson kept a top-of-the-order slot through a 178-point collapse. The players who got moved around were, on average, producing as well or better.

Stability tracked status. It did not track performance.

The bullpen says the same thing in a different language.

The two relievers with the worst ERA and the worst WHIP on this list collected nineteen of the saves. Ryan Helsley got eight of them in fifteen and a third innings. Tyler Wells, who was the best reliever on the team by some distance, got six.

So I will put my conclusion the careful way. This does not show a bad manager. Brandon Young’s ERA does not show a good pitcher either, and the point of this newsletter is that the obvious number is usually the wrong one.

What it shows is a manager allocating roles by standing rather than by results. On a veteran team chasing a title, that is a virtue: it is how you keep a clubhouse together through a slump. On a team whose entire theory of value is that young players develop into stars, it is the opposite of the job. You cannot both build around development and hand the defined roles to the players who are not developing.

That is the mismatch. Not competence. Fit.

Here is the honest accounting.

What is real: Alonso’s bat. Cowser’s glove. Rogers’ underlying performance. A bullpen that proved it can be rebuilt from spare parts. Mayo and Basallo trending up.

What is hope: That Henderson’s three-year slide reverses. That Holliday’s third season was the aberration rather than the trend. That Bautista and Helsley are healthy after contributing seventeen innings. That the outfield fixes itself internally when the internal options are the ones who just posted a .657.

That is a lot of hope, and most of it is attached to players whose last full season argued against it.

The mitigations that follow from the numbers rather than from optimism are narrow: buy outfield offense, because it is the single largest gap and it will not close from within. Make Rogers a priority, not a formality. He is a free agent with a 3.60 expected ERA wearing a 4.03 on his page, and the market reads the page. Stop building a bullpen plan around two arms with injury histories, not because Bautista and Helsley are bad, but because the 2026 team already ran that experiment and needed four unplanned relievers to survive it.

And the question I cannot answer with a spreadsheet, so I will just put it plainly: if the highest-expectation young hitters get worse while the quiet ones get better, that is either terrible luck three times over, or it is about how this team develops hitters. I do not know which. But two more seasons of it and the rebuild will not have produced a contender; it will have produced a very expensive lesson.

Tell me where you think I am wrong. I got the defense wrong in this piece and only found out because I checked. If you think I am wrong about Henderson, or about the manager question I have carefully not answered here, make the case and I will run the numbers.

Definitions used: outfield_offense@v1 · outs_above_average@v1 · era_minus_xera@v1 · lineup_stability@v1 · late_inning_role@v1 · Each links to the exact filter, the thresholds, and the argument against them.

Sources: MLB Stats API (season and roster statistics); Baseball Savant (Outs Above Average, expected statistics). Full 2026 season. The Bottom Row No. 004 · bottomrowsports.substack.com · Written by a fan, for an argument. Bring your own numbers.