The 2025 MLB season is almost upon us! With about one week to go before the Cubs and Dodgers do battle in Tokyo, each team is gearing up for the long, annual 162-game grind.
Each day this week at Call To The Pen, we'll take a look at every team in every division and analyze their best and worst-case scenarios for the 2025 season. Let's start off with the home of the reigning American League pennant winners in the AL East:
Baltimore Orioles
Best-case scenario: The upside to the Orioles roster is immense. Could Jackson Holliday, as a 21-year-old survivor of a dispiriting rookie season, blossom? That’s hardly out of the question. Adley Rutschman, 27, is coming off the worst offensive season of his career, so increased production is almost inevitable from the star backstop.
Colton Cowser had a 24-homer rookie season, and there’s no reason to expect less. Gunnar Henderson hit 37 homers with an .893 OPS; that’s pushing the elite level.
Jordan Westburg, 26, looks to be established at third base and Tyler O’Neill, coming over from Boston, has a good body of work. A lineup featuring fully matured and productive versions of Henderson, Westburg, O’Neill, Cowser, Rutschman and Holliday would be legitimately intimidating. Could that lineup carry the Orioles to a division championship? Absolutely.
Worst-case scenario: The rotation leads off with Zach Eflin, Dean Kremer, Grayson Rodriguez, Charlie Morton and Tomoyuki Sugano. As a group, that fivesome went 19-28 in MLB last season — Sugano pitched in Japan — so it is at best unproven., and Rodriguez is already sidelined with elbow concerns.
The Orioles were league average on the mound in both ERA and runs allowed per game in 2024, and that was with Corbin Burnes at the top of the rotation. Morton is Burnes’ designated replacement. He’s savvy, but he’s also 41 and it’s fair to wonder how much he has left.
And for all the potential star power in Baltimore’s every-day lineup, the reality is that Holliday has not yet shown he’s up to big league pitching, and perhaps he’ll show that he’s not. Ditto for Heston Kjerstad.
If the pitching sags, the Orioles will fade from contention.
Most realistic scenario: Holliday makes modest progress, the pitching is a constant irritant, and the Orioles do well to hang around the fringes of playoff contention in both the division and wild card races.