In a season like the Orioles have had, you don’t have to look far to find a source of frustration. Injuries and underperformance will do that.

Colton Cowser has dealt with it all to this point. The former first-round pick injured his thumb sliding headfirst into first base on the first weekend of the season, missed two months and came back swinging a hot bat before falling off lately.

His efforts to build on a rookie season in which he slugged his way to the everyday left fielder role early in 2024 have been uneven at best. Before the Orioles hit the road last week, Cowser spoke of his efforts to get his swing and approach aligned.

There are a lot of pressing needs for the Orioles as they wrap up this season and get ready to try to contend again in 2026. Cowser’s chief task is going to be to finish in a way he’s confident in carrying forward.

“I feel like I came back and was feeling pretty good, and decided to run into a wall and had to take a couple days off, battling through a little bit of pain, but just trying to find the approach after that was interesting,” Cowser told me last week.

“I think that I was going through some adversity when it comes to some mechanical things, some approach things, so struggled a little bit, but ultimately I think that the big thing for me is just being consistent with the approach and what I’m trying to do at the plate. Going through these woes and ups and downs, I try to isolate what I’m trying to do whenever I’m struggling versus when I’m not, and I think just to finish out the year, just trying to hit the ball hard and good things will happen.”

To the extent good things have happened to this point, Cowser’s hard contact has been responsible for them. He has nine home runs in 214 plate appearances, but his slug has eluded him since the All-Star break. Before that, he had 15 extra-base hits to 15 singles in 147 plate appearances. Since, he has eight singles, a pair of doubles and one home run in 64 plate appearances, striking out in 24 of them.

Cowser attributed some of that to his approach and what has proven to be a challenging effort to cut down on strikeouts. He said he’d been evaluating how infrequently he’s walked this year — just 6.2% of the time after walking 15.6% of the time in the minors and 9.3% of the time in the majors in 2024 — and it came down to his plan.

“I was trying to cut down on some of the strikeouts, and so my big goal every time I’m in the batter’s box is to have the at-bat over when it’s supposed to be over,” Cowser said. “I think I went through a period where I wasn’t striking out as much and the at-bat was finishing when it was supposed to, but I kind of lost a tick of aggressiveness. I was putting the ball in play, hitting it hard at good angles, but they were just kind of lineouts or whatever it was, just hitting ground balls and whatnot.

“And so I think that those things go into me not walking as much, but we talked about it and you walk from your aggressiveness in the zone. I think I’m slowly getting back into being aggressive in the zone, getting my ‘A’ swing off, and then getting to two strikes and trying to compete as much as I can. I’m going to strike out, a lot of really good players strike out a lot, so just being OK with that, because I think that the damage that I can do while I’m being aggressive outweighs some of those strikeouts at other times.”

The challenge is finding a balance. It should also be noted that, after struggling badly in leverage situations and those with runners in scoring position in 2024, he’s been far better this year.

That’s no small accomplishment. More pressing, though, is for Cowser to lock into what his approach should be overall. That slug Cowser is seeking when he’s aggressive seems to have a strikeout cost, one that feels like it would be worth it when he’s clicking. But, if the on-base capability isn’t complementing that, there’s bound to be volatility in his performance.

It’s unclear what the Orioles’ appetite for that type of output will be. The organizational swing decision emphasis still exists, and Cowser was drafted in the first round in 2021 for a lot of reasons — his hard contact ability among them but also his demonstrated skills at controlling the strike zone and getting on base.

He’s not chasing that much more this year, offering at pitches outside the zone 25.5% of the time entering Wednesday’s game versus 24.8% in 2024. He’s being equally stringent at chasing with two strikes.

The results, however, are challenging. As Cowser was coming up through the minors, I was often advised by people in the organization not to box him into one particular profile because he had the ability to be a table-setter at the top of the lineup or a middle-of-the-order slugger. The dream, of course, is to marry those two things.

Intentionally or not, it seems like the slugging path is the one Cowser is on. There’s nothing wrong with that when executed well. The rest of this season is going to be an opportunity for Cowser to show, in whatever form he chooses to take, what should be expected of him going forward.