The Orioles’ young core.

As ubiquitous as that phrase has been, it’s growing outdated. Yes, the players pile into spring training houses together, are close friends off the field and are all products of a miserable rebuild that yielded all the high draft picks that produced them.

But, to fairly assess the Orioles as a team after a massively disappointing season is to assess them individually. They’re all at different stages of their careers. They have reached different highs and fallen to different lows as major leaguers. There’s a lot more nuance than putting a blanket over them all can deliver.

As the offseason progresses, I’m going to try to assess each with that nuance in mind to see if that impacts my overall view of the player and the team he’s a big part of. We’ll start with perhaps the most fascinating of all, shortstop Gunnar Henderson.

2025 in review

It says plenty about Henderson that, in what was considered a down year for him, he was still really good. Henderson was worth 4.8 wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs, and hit .274 with a .787 OPS and 17 home runs in 154 games.

That pales in comparison to his 2024 season, but considering Henderson missed part of spring training and the first week of the season with a rib injury and started slowly once he was back, it’s not far off those marks.

He had a .681 OPS on May 1, then had an .806 OPS and 126 wRC+ from May 1 on —and that’s including a slow September. Throughout, the power just wasn’t there. His slugging percentage of .438 for the season was far below last year’s .529, and even if the gulf of his expected slugging from year to year was less wide, we’re still talking about drastically less power than expected.

What did we learn?

Spring training matters, for starters. It didn’t help that Henderson faced an outsize proportion of lefties (and All-Star-caliber ones at that) once he returned, either. But, if we are going to take anything away from Henderson’s season, it’s that he’s a young player who’s still getting better.

You could see that at shortstop, where he went from 25 errors to eight while solidifying his ability to make the plays he’s supposed to make and continuing to execute the hard ones as well.

There’s also a lot of credit to be given for him being a constant source of effort and passion for this team. You could see how frustrated he was with himself when things weren’t going well, but he grinded until the end in this lost season, and that tells you a lot about him as a player and a person. And that’s encouraging, because the talent is not in question.

What about before that?

We only need to look at his 2024 season — when Henderson had an .893 OPS and 37 home runs with a 7.9 fWAR — to know what kind of player he can be. Similarly, he had plenty of pop in his first full season in 2023, hitting 28 home runs despite having just five by the end of May.

For that reason, plus his athleticism, defense at a premium position and ability to get on base, Henderson entered this year considered one of the top young players in the game and comfortably on a list of players you could expect to win an MVP award at some point.

Best case/worst case for 2026

The above still feels true, especially considering the only thing that really held him back on that front was the power production.

By and large, his exit speeds held in 2025. His hard-hit rate was 49.2%, down from 53.9% in 2024 and 52% in 2023. He hit ground balls slightly more often than in 2024 but not at a rate that would suggest this kind of dip in production.

It all speaks to the kind of swing complication that’s hard to fix over the course of a long season and can be addressed in the offseason. I’d bet on Henderson being much closer to his 2024 home run total than this year’s in 2026, and adding that to the player he showed he could be this year puts him back into MVP contention.

The downside would be that Henderson overcorrects and his pursuit of regaining that power doesn’t work or comes at the expense of the other things he does well. If this is too power focused for your liking, I’ll just point out that players earn the biggest raises in arbitration and eventually get paid in free agency by slugging.

Henderson will want to be better for his own sake, and for the team’s, but to overindex toward power could take away from his overall offensive package. If that happens, the worst-case scenario going forward is that he vacillates between offensive extremes and never finds that sweet spot he showed in 2024.

What can you count on going forward?

Remember how Henderson had a rough start to 2023? Well, he obviously recovered that year and, until this season, didn’t look back. But, as bad as we remember April 2023 was for him, both April and September this season were worse, by wRC+.

All that is to say that we have probably seen Henderson at his worst, and it was still pretty good. That makes me think this year is about the floor that can be expected of a healthy Henderson.

Development isn’t linear; that’s something we heard plenty this year and we hear all the time. At age 24, Henderson isn’t close to his prime. He may not get better immediately, or every year, but he’s going to keep improving. I don’t think he’ll do anything but ascend. And that kind of star power returning is going to be a fine starting point for the Orioles’ return to contention.