What was expected?

Following a breakout season in 2023 that saw the Orioles win 101 games, their first AL East division title in nearly a decade, and the top seed in the American League playoffs, many expected the Orioles to compete for a World Series in 2024. Despite getting ransacked by the eventual champion Texas Rangers in the ALDS, it was easy to assume that this young team’s playoff experience in the year prior would allow for a more advanced approach towards 2024.

The team had lost some veterans entering 2024, namely SP Kyle Gibson, OF Aaron Hicks, and 2B Adam Frazier, to free agency, so there would need to be new voices of leadership in the locker room to keep this young squad heading in the right direction.

In free agency, the Orioles made just one significant signing, inking RP Craig Kimbrel to a one-year, $12 million contract with a club option for 2025 (which obviously, will not be picked up after his eventual release). Kimbrel was expected to anchor the bullpen after star closer Felix Bautista underwent Tommy John surgery towards the end of the 2023 season. Bautista, 29, is expected to be fully recovered for Spring Training in 2025.

A likely reason for this lack of spending in free agency entering the 2024 season is that the ownership of the Orioles changed hands just before Opening Day. Previous owner John Angelos sold the team without much of any notice to a group led by multi-billionaire, Magna Carta owner David Rubenstein. Rubenstein, 75, is the first majority owner of the Orioles who is not a member of the Angelos family since 1993 and will look to spend more to keep this team competitive in the coming years.

After a relatively uneventful off-season, general manager Mike Elias made a huge splash on the trade market just before the beginning of Spring Training. The Orioles’ front office made it clear that they were looking for an ace to anchor this rotation, and they got their guy in SP Corbin Burnes. Burnes, 29, was added purely as a rental, as he hits free agency after the 2024 season. What made Burnes so appealing to the Orioles was that they would not have to part with any of their elite, top-25 overall prospects and could instead pull from their tremendous farm depth to add a seasoned, impact starter to their staff. The Orioles traded INF Joey Ortiz and LHP DL Hall, along with their compensation draft pick for Gunnar Henderson winning AL Rookie of the Year in 2023 to the Milwaukee Brewers. Overall, the Orioles did not have room for Ortiz in the infield, felt like Hall was expendable, and were willing to part with a draft pick in the 30s to get a former Cy Young award winner for one season.

All signs were pointing towards the Orioles being one of the best teams in the sport in 2024. With an electric young core built around SS Gunnar Henderson and C Adley Rutschman, many more highly-anticipated prospects were banging down the door to play their first full season in the major leagues and put this team among the league’s elite.

How did it go?

It wasn’t as successful as 2023, but finishing 91-71 and clinching the top wild card in the American League playoffs is still by and large a good season for the Orioles. Henderson, Burnes, and OF Anthony Santander all had very successful seasons for a team that seemed to fade as the summer was drawing to a close. The Orioles were battling it out with the eventual AL East champion New York Yankees for the division crown for most of the season, their largest lead being three games ahead of the Bronx Bombers on July 7, before the Yankees gradually pulled ahead in September.

The Orioles were swept at home in two games in the best-of-three Wild Card series by the Kansas City Royals (86-76), painfully losing 1-0 in game one and following that up with a lackluster 2-1 loss in game two. The Orioles are on a ten-game postseason losing streak as a franchise, their last playoff victory coming at the hands of the Detroit Tigers in 2014, who they swept in the ALDS that year. Their playoff losing streak began after getting swept in the 2014 ALCS immediately by, you guessed it, the Royals.

Many pointed to injuries to pitching as the cause for their lack of dominance in 2024, as they saw a really talented starter in Kyle Bradish get Tommy John surgery in June. Other rotation candidates John Means and Tyler Wells were also forced to go under the knife and end their seasons before the All-Star break. Talented young righty Grayson Rodriguez dealt with injuries at multiple points in the season as well, and would not pitch again after July 31 after dealing with lat pain warming up for his first start in the month of August. Missing a stud closer like Bautista certainly didn’t help the bullpen, but it also didn’t help that Kimbrel was completely erratic, pitching to a 5.33 ERA on the season and more specifically, a 10.59 ERA in the second half. Kimbrel was released just before the end of the regular season.

Ultimately, pitching wasn’t the reason that the O’s lost in the playoffs. They surrendered three runs in 18 innings. Elias made a lot of trades at the deadline, landing another solid starter from the Tampa Bay Rays in RHP Zach Eflin, while also picking up intriguing bullpen arms who had been struggling with the Philadelphia Phillies in RHP Seranthony Dominguez and LHP Gregory Soto. All three of these pitchers are likely to be Orioles in 2025 as well. The only notable major leaguer that was traded away was OF Austin Hays, who had been with the team through their entire rebuild. The Orioles also added some batters in DH Eloy Jimenez and OF Austin Slater, but those moves were largely insignificant.

The offense, overall, was good during the regular season. They scuffled down the stretch with All-Star INF Jordan Westburg, 1B Ryan Mountcastle, OF Heston Kjerstad, and INF Ramon Urias all on the injured list towards the end of the season. Rutschman also struggled mightily in the second half. Ultimately, the reason for their demise was, well, they didn’t score. OF Cedric Mullins hit a solo home run in game two, and that was it. Perhaps most notably, their superstar Henderson went 0-for-7 with two walks and four strikeouts in the two-game sweep.

This young core that was so highly touted is now 0-5 in the playoffs, so 2025 will be a tremendously important season for the trajectory of the franchise, as currently constructed.

Fantasy Stud?

Despite his lackluster playoff performance, the fantasy stud of the Orioles during the regular season was their shortstop, Gunnar Henderson.

Henderson followed up his Rookie of the Year season in 2023 by establishing himself among the game’s elite offensively in 2024. In his age-23 season, Henderson slashed .281/.364/.529 with 37 home runs, 92 RBI, 118 runs scored, and 21 stolen bases. His .381 wOBA, .379 xwOBA, and 155 wRC+ will put him in conversations as a fantasy first-round pick in 2025.

It’s more than possible that Henderson will push for 50 home run seasons in his career. He has tremendous bat speed and great hard-hit rates at such a young age while playing half of his games in a park that is friendly to left-handed hitters. While he won’t be an MVP front runner this year due to tremendous seasons from Yankees’ OF Aaron Judge and Royals’ SS Bobby Witt Jr., Henderson will certainly be among the betting favorites for the 2025 AL MVP award.

SP Corbin Burnes also had a tremendous season and his output would have earned him the title of “fantasy stud” on many other teams in the league that do not have a superstar hitter, like Henderson.

Fantasy Dud?

The fantasy dud for the Orioles this season was their closer for much of the season, Craig Kimbrel.

The Orioles had hoped that he would be able to fill the void of Bautista, but he was largely a net-negative addition to their team and to those of fantasy managers that drafted him. He did garner 23 saves despite his woes this season, mostly due to a good two-month stretch in May and June.

Even after a fairly solid season with the Phillies in 2023 that saw him throw 69 innings with a 3.26 ERA and a 34% strikeout rate, fantasy owners were still a little hesitant to invest in Kimbrel too early. His NFBC ADP stood at 135 after draft season, making him RP17.

But in 2024, it looked like the 36-year old Kimbrel’s tremendous major league career may be nearing its end. Despite still sporting an elite 31% strikeout rate, Kimbrel’s aforementioned 5.33 ERA in 52.1 IP was dreadful and it got worse as the season wore on. It remains to be seen if he will get a chance with a major league team in 2025, but if he does it will certainly come with no guarantee of a high-leverage role in a major league bullpen.

Rookie 2B/SS Jackson Holliday (NFBC ADP: 180) was also considered, but ultimately he was a very speculative draft pick. Kimbrel was drafted to every team with the expectation that he would be a positive contributor, which he largely was not.

Fantasy Surprise?

I want to start by saying, there were a lot of surprises, both positive and negative with the Orioles’ 2024 season. Here were some of the honorable mentions.

• Anthony Santander (NFBC ADP: 136) hit 44 home runs with 101 RBI!
• Craig Kimbrel was an utter disappointment.
• Jackson Holliday (.189 AVG, 5 HR) was completely useless to fantasy managers and looked overmatched.
• Jordan Westburg (NFBC ADP: 307) was an All-Star!
• Colton Cowser (NFBC ADP: 485) carved out an everyday role and hit 24 home runs!

All of those were at least a little bit surprising, one way or another. But in the truest sense of the word surprise, I would have to say that the winner of this award goes to SP Albert Suarez.

Suarez, now 35, returned to the MLB for the first time since 2017 to pitch for the Orioles in his age-34 season. He had thrown 115.2 major league innings for the San Francisco Giants between 2016-17, and was not very effective. Suarez pitched for two seasons in South Korea, in the KBO, between 2022-23 where he began his attempt to make a comeback to the major leagues. The Orioles paid him $740K to bring him onto their roster and he began the year in Triple-A Norfolk.

Once the injuries were quickly piling up, Suarez was thrusted into the role of a spot starter. When he showed that he could handle that, he ended up staying in the starting rotation for the majority of the season. Suarez was a huge help to a banged up Orioles starting rotation that desperately needed it.

Suarez (NFBC ADP: 747, for those leagues that even drafted him) ended up throwing 133.2 innings with a 3.70 ERA, producing six quality starts out of 24 total starting appearances. Suarez had a five-start stretch in August that really put him on the map in fantasy, where he threw 30.1 innings with just 4 earned runs. The fact that a player like this became legitimately fantasy relevant at all, is a much bigger surprise to me than any other story about one of the Orioles’ top prospects becoming good players.

Player Breakdowns:

Hitters

Gunnar Henderson, SS

Who better to kick things off with than the clear MVP of the Orioles? Henderson has ascended to a clear first-round pick in dynasty formats with that aforementioned 155 wRC+ at just 23 years old, but also should be in the conversation for the back-half of the first round in redraft leagues as well.

So how was Henderson able to improve upon a Rookie of the Year-winning campaign from 2023? First and foremost, he saw his walk rate increase from 9% to 10.8%, and his strikeout rate fell from 25.6% to 22.1%. Those may seem like insignificant adjustments to the untrained eye, but it bumped Henderson up from below average in strikeout rate to about average, and from about average to the top 20% in the league in walk rate.

This matured approach at the plate also allowed Henderson to make better swing decisions – he swung at slightly fewer pitches overall, but increased his contact percentages and his hard-hit rate. This is all great news because Henderson saw fewer first pitch strikes than he did in 2023 and swung and missed at less pitches than he did previously as well. It appears as though Henderson is getting a better feel of controlling a major league strike zone.

Another example of Henderson refining his approach is that he saw a major uptick in production against sliders, compared to his rookie year. In a very similar number of plate appearances, Henderson went from hitting .195 with seven home runs against sliders to this past season hitting .299 with 14 home runs against sliders. It’s plenty clear that we watched a superstar blossom before our eyes in 2024 and Henderson should be a top pick for years to come.

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