Will Gunnar Henderson And Pete Alonso Turn This Orioles Season Around? Maybe Not With This Staff

Once again Tuesday night the smallball Orioles managed to walk and work counts and punch pitches the opposite way to get on base around their two big boppers in the middle of the lineup.

And yet again, Gunnar Henderson and Pete Alondo could not deliver.

Both failed to get the ball out of the infield, while hitting it on the ground (not a new development for either), with the bases loaded in a tie game at Camden Yards in the 9th inning. It’s been a significant issue in a poor 2026 season for the foundering franchise. And with the front office obsessed with giving former top overall pick Adley Rutschman the maximum amount of rest and recovery and days off as possible (at a time when the switch-hitting catcher is finally hitting for the first time in two years), it’s created a massive void in this lineup that has much to do with a 31-37 start.

It’s already raised some questions within the industry about how well Alonso’s team-record contract (five years, $155M) will age, with the first-baseman slugger already 31 years old and eventually eheaded for a designated hitter role. Bat speed inevitably slows and while Alonso is still mashing fastballs overall, he’s been unable to produce in the clutch in fastball counts all season, and it’s also fair to wonder if Baseball Genius Mike Elias constantly tinkering with the left field dimensions at Oriole Park like the Lego sets his not-so-young-anymore core is infatuated with is already in Alonso’s head (like so many other RH powers hitters here in the recent past, and like Taylor Ward in the present).

Regardless of what’s happening or not happening between the ears with the two most important everyday hitters on the team or whatever this wildly suspect coaching staff is doing to correct it, this had best change quickly. To be fair, for a roster that can’t field and features has an incredibly wobbly rotation, it’s already likely too late.

Especially since the other guy who is supposed to be penciled between 2-4 in the lineup every night, Rutschman, has some “hamstring tightness” now and barely plays anyway, with three more plate appearances all season than Leody Taveras, who wasn’t supposed to crack this “talented” roster yet is the only centerfielder on it. Oh, and the front office is also picking fights with 21-year old Samuel Basallo, a top performer hitting with men in scoring position, via Elias Puppet Skipper 3.0, so credit the inept GM for covering every bases here to provide Orioles fans a bush league product (when MASN figures out how to broadcast it).

Not So Clutch

For the season, Alonso has produced the following with RISP:

.195/.253/.377, WRC+ 68 (100 is average), 36% ground ball rate, 31% K rate

As for Henderson with RISP:

.250/.344/.355, WRC+ 104, 43%(!) GB rate, 26% K rate

With men on base this season, these two have combined for 10 homers and 57 RBIS with mid-June approaching. Andy Pages (Dodgers) has 12 and 53 himself. Catcher Dillon Dingler (Tigers) has 11 and 43 (including some at the Orioles expense). Not nearly good enough.

Henderson and Alonso have combined for 148 plate appearances with runners in scoring position and have struck out 43 times (29%) and produced hits just 28 times. Alonso has already hit into five double plays in those situations and has made doing so with the bases loaded something of a hallmark already.

You could certainly look at their past track records and account for positive regression taking hold, but Alonso is bearing a ton of pressure now and was supposed to be the adult to turn this clubhouse and baseball product around. The longer this rot goes on, it’s fair to wonder how much that continues to impact the former All Star.

Wrong Ballpark For Alonso?

Right-handed hitters continue to largely suffer at Camden Yards when wearing an Orioles uniform (Austin Hays, Ryan Mountcastle, Tyler O’Neill, now Ward isn’t a 35 homer guy he is a 200 walk guy). Alonso offers no true defensive value (outside of being great at scooping bad throws at less important position) or speed. It’s power or bust.

And as he moves deeper into his 30s on that side of the plate in this ballpark, these early returns might prove stunningly telling. The fact Elias, a horrible evaluator of Major League talent by any standard, chose him over all other options is another terribly bad sign.

Alonso has 28 strikeouts to seven walks at home, with just nine extra base hits in 36 games. He’s been a below average hitter there per WRC+ and has a meek 15% HR rate while hitting the ball on the ground a ridiculous 45% of the time at home and pulling the ball just 35% of the time. This is a guy who has pulled the ball 41% of the time in compiling the profile that landed him this contract; Alonso pulled over 20% of every ball he hit in the air as a Met and it’s a career-low (by far) 15% this season overall (not just at home).

(Yikes. Wonder what he would have done with the original ballpark dimensions before a know-nothing GM and his band of sycophant fools started butchering it?)

Alonso is still largely all over fastballs and change ups, but will continue to see more breaking stuff which is contributing to failing in the clutch and posting just a .226/.318,/.383 line at home. This part of the equation might not get better and it’s why longtime esteemed baseball analyst Joe Sheehan (joesheehan.com) already flagged this contract.

“A lot of right-handed hitters who are past 30 now, we’re seeing them age out of the league more quickly,” Sheehan said on Tuesday’s “The Daily Flock” show. “Because pitchers just throw so much harder with such nastier breaking stuff …

“The first year is when you’re going to get the most value out of a contract like this, right? You figure, ‘Hey, even if this falls apart (eventually), we’re going to get that one big year. Well, this isn’t that one big year right now. This is a 110 OPS+ and a 110 OPS+ would be pretty bad …

“Alonso was brought in to be the No. 3 hitter – 135, 140 OPS+ with 40 to 45 bombs. And if he’s not that guy they really don’t have a replacement for that.”

Gunnar Going Backwards

Henderson should be other guy, but hasn’t been close to it.

This is someone who should still talked about with Bobby Witt Jr. as the best SS in the game, if this organization had a clue about player development. He has those tools … but he ain’t anything close to being that player. He is barely, barely, by the most generous of grading across all aspects of play, an average major league baseball plater. And that is a gross failure on the entire organization.

We’ve chronicled the bone-headed stuff like throwing bats and losing his cool and getting picked off multiple times in games. He was never going to be a great shortstop (former GM Jim Duquette agreed with me on “The Daily Flock” that he should be at third base ideally) and needed special range to cover up other issues. Being saddled with poor second-basemen up the middle has just made it worse and turned DP balls into misadventures.

Yet everyone in this franchise walks on egg shells around him, and genuflects, because he is represented by power agent Scott Boras, and even though there is zero chance he ever signs an extension here, Elias likes when Boras praises him, and likes that Boras uses him as a Trojan horse in big-time free agent negotiations. So Elias can keep the money in his Private Equity billionaire bosses pockets (to help keep his job ‘cuz they don’t want to spend), and go about selling useful idiots in the local and national media on how “close’ they came to keeping Corbin Burnes or Cody Bellinger or Ranger Suarez, only to actually end up with an overpriced DH (Alonso).

This staff seems woefully ill-equipped to harness Henderson’s skillset or emotions, and this has the chance to really go off the rails if they don’t get him sorted soon. He’s a .300 hitter off fastballs in his career but it’s .222 this season. He’s striking out 25% of the time, like he did as a rookie, with the lowest walk rate of his career (7%) and the at bats have been too ugly, too often.

The Orioles never made any headway on an extension and, with free agency looming in 2028, that ship has sailed with Boras taking his guys to the market almost exclusively. Henderson takes every little mistake so personally it seems to be seeping into all aspects of his game, and he also watched the only player Elias ever drafted before him (Rutschman) fall into a massive, 1 ½ season hole, in which he was one of the worst everyday MLB hitters on any roster while his defense declined rapidly.

Could it happen again?

“It’s a decline, across the board,” Sheehan said of Henderson. “There is nothing you can look at in Gunnar Henderson’s game right now and go, ‘ Okay, but he’s still doing this.’ It’s approach, it’s results on contact, it’s baserunning and it’s defense. So, yeah, that’s a little bit scary.”

Gulp.

See you in 2027, folks. Hopefully with a real front office in place and every vestige of Elias throw out of The Warehouse.

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