I don’t think any of these young, homegrown Orioles hitters need a wake-up call after this season has provided bucket after bucket of cold water to the face. They understand they need to be better. But as far as messages go, this one was anything but subtle.

While driving my daughter to gymnastics up Falls Road on Sunday morning, a new Orioles billboard caught my eye. It had the Birdland member logo with the ornithologically correct bird we’ve seen from 2026 marketing materials, so I know it was new. So new, in fact, that it had Samuel Basallo — who debuted just over a month ago — front and center, with Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday flanking him.

Adley Rutschman was nowhere to be found.

I get the ease of picking the one player to sign a long-term extension here (Basallo) and the two players who have ground away through this long season without missing major time and hopefully come out better for it (Henderson and Holliday), rather than Rutschman, who has underperformed since last year’s All-Star break and hasn’t played much in the second half due to a pair of oblique injuries.

It still feels noteworthy as we are set to shift our attention to front office and managerial speculation, roster-building exercises and all the other repercussions that come with underperforming the way the Orioles have. There’s a roomful of players who are supposed to be better than this, and they would be advised to use the well-deserved break coming up to figure out a way to live up to that.

The list of once and current top prospects on whom the hopes of this team were pinned is long: Rutschman, Henderson, Holliday, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser, Coby Mayo, Heston Kjerstad, and now Basallo and Dylan Beavers. There are qualifiers galore when evaluating them individually, be it injuries (Rutschman, Cowser and Westburg), growing pains (Holliday to an extent, Mayo and Kjerstad) or otherwise, but pretty much no one in is immune to criticism for their role in how this season went.

We won’t know the Orioles’ assessment of any of them until the offseason is settled and we see who, if anyone, has a more proven or experienced player at his spot. The idea that they can do this all with their own drafted players, at least in the lineup, did not survive this season.

Everyone tried their best. For a variety of reasons that we all know well by now, this season was still the worst. And no matter how much Mike Elias and his team do to improve the Orioles’ roster or processes or staff this winter, there will be a subtext of any recovery hope that the players who disappointed in one way or another this year do not underperform again.

I imagine they won’t. They’ll certainly say they won’t. But we’ve also heard this group for two years running have their season end in gutting fashion and resolve to use it as fuel going forward. This year, the end isn’t arriving suddenly. They’ve been slogging to this point for months and will deserve the rest and recovery that begins next week. But we’ve already heard the same message and probably will through the weekend.

Of course they are hurting from this and want to reverse it next year. Pretty much everyone in that room needs to play better for that to happen. There are consequences far worse than being left off a billboard if they don’t.

On the pod

That pesky Ravens game meant Paul and I are recording Wednesday, and we plan to talk about interim manager Tony Mansolino and his staff’s future, as well as what the next couple of weeks could look like for the Orioles as this season wraps up.

Ballpark Chatter

“Nobody was kind of stepping up, taking the leadership role. And, when we were starting to lose over and over again, we just couldn’t find a way to get out of that slump.” – Tomoyuki Sugano on the Orioles’ early-season collapse.

I don’t think even I, someone who will gladly avoid the leadership talk when I can help it, can avoid it anymore.

The more postmortems that are written about the Orioles’ season, the more this is going to be a message in it. You’ll notice nowhere in the above challenge for these guys to, you know, play better was there anything on this topic. It’s kind of a blind spot for me. But this reads more like an organizational and perhaps managerial issue rather than a clubhouse one. Everyone was trying to figure his own stuff out in those early-season struggles. There needed to be someone from above to help break the skid while the players worked through theirs.

By the numbers

.574

That’s the Orioles’ win percentage in games started by Trevor Rogers, Kyle Bradish, Tyler Wells and Dean Kremer this season. Their record in those games is 31-23, and each pitcher has one start apiece left.

If you are wondering why I put Kremer in there, you’re probably new here. But he’s going to continue to be a valuable part of this team, so he’s in. That’s a 93-win pace over basically a quarter of a season with that group, which collectively has a 3.04 ERA and 1.03 WHIP. There are question marks — who knows what role Wells will be in, or who will be added to the group, or what the expectation is for Grayson Rodriguez. You don’t have to squint super hard and see a good rotation carrying this team back to contention.

Talent pipeline

Cameron Foster and Anthony Nunez

A pair of relievers the Orioles added in separate deals from the Mets earlier this summer, Cameron Foster and Anthony Nunez, finished the year well at Triple-A Norfolk.

Nunez, a 24-year-old acquired in the Cedric Mullins deal, had a 3.45 ERA and a 0.89 WHIP with 21 strikeouts in 15 2/3 innings at Norfolk after a scoreless inning post-trade at Double-A Chesapeake.

Foster, 26, had a 3.38 ERA and a 1.38 WHIP with 23 strikeouts in 16 innings at Norfolk after being acquired in the Gregory Soto trade. They’re both in the mix to get added to the 40-man roster this winter, which puts them in the mix to be part of the Orioles’ 2026 plans.

For further reading

🧢Such a great read: Here’s a terrific piece Andy last week on first base coach Anthony Sanders, his family, and their connection to HBCU baseball. So cool that he got to go to Alaska to see his kids play on the same team.

😮‍💨 Breathe in, breathe out: Similarly, great story on Dylan Beavers from Andy. Remembering to breathe is indeed important.