Tyler O’Neill will officially be hanging around on the Orioles, or at least on the Orioles payroll, for another two years. The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka reported on Monday afternoon that O’Neill has declined to exercise the opt-out in his contract, so he will stick around and make another $16.5 million per year for the next two seasons.
When the Orioles signed O’Neill to a three-year contract during the last offseason, that contract included the opt-out as an enticement. I think Mike Elias’s
hope was that O’Neill would repeat something like his 2024 season, when he hit over 30 homers for the Red Sox, and back out of the rest of the contract. This would allow the Orioles to extend him a qualifying offer and pocket a 2026 draft pick if he went on to sign a big contract elsewhere.
There are surely versions of the 2025 season where O’Neill remained healthy and ended up launching bombs at the moved-in Walltimore 2.0, a decision that almost seemed like it was an enticement aimed at O’Neill specifically last offseason in addition to future righty power batters. That’s not the version of the 2025 season that we experienced, however. O’Neill was, as one could have predicted from his career track record, hurt frequently.
In all, O’Neill played in exactly one-third of Orioles games: 54. He hit .199/.292/.392, so when he did play, he was bad. He finished with a -0.6 bWAR for the season, making it likely that the three-year, $49.5 million contract will be a bust overall unless he really goes bonkers in the next two years. What’s done is done, however, and the most important thing for the O’s of the next two years is that when O’Neill plays, that he is actually able to deliver the power that he’s shown in 25% of his big league seasons.
That’s not a very large percentage where O’Neill has been anything close to a quality player. It remains weird that this is the guy who Elias gave his first multi-year free agent deal as a GM. As with so many other aspects of the hitting portion of the roster, not much the Orioles can do except bring nearly every one of the same guys back and hope things go better with injuries and coaching-related improvement than what happened this year.
In other news relating to Orioles contract options, the team has declined a $5.5 million option for Jorge Mateo. That’s according to Francys Romero of BeisbolFR. With that choice, Mateo becomes a free agent. He, too, was hurt for most of this season and bad when he did play, hitting just .177/.217/.266 in 42 games. It was time to find a new utility player.
The only other Orioles contract option decision to be settled, according to Roster Resource at FanGraphs, is a $3 million option for Dietrich Enns. That seems like that should be an easy pickup by the team, but then, that’s what I thought about Danny Coulombe’s contract option this time a year ago and the Orioles did not exercise that option, to their detriment in 2025.
