The Orioles stories you cared about the most this year

Over the last couple of weeks, Camden Chat’s writers have been looking back on what we thought were some of the biggest single storylines of the year for the Orioles. There were many to choose from, big and

small. As the year 2025 is on its way out, I’m going to share one more set of big stories, as determined by what on Camden Chat you, the readers, engaged with the most over the course of the year.

To generate this list, I’ve used our internal metrics tool for the whole year, measuring total engaged minutes. This is what gets a look now because that’s showing not just how many clicks an article got, but how many people spent time on a page, hopefully actually reading the article and perhaps also reading or leaving comments.

As of this writing (December 22) when I generated the list for this countdown, we had close to one million visitors and eight million engaged minutes this year. Thanks for reading and hanging out! I hope that the Orioles give the Camden Chat writers some happier stories to write and that they give you some happier stories to read about in 2026.

Counting down from ten to one, with 10-6 as more quick hits and 5-1 in more detail:

#10

The headline: Perfect Orioles trade deadline farewell party ruined by Cano implosion in 9-8 loss to Jays
The date: July 30
What we said:

You could hardly have scripted it better for Orioles fans to be able to have a fun final memory of these guys with the team, and even for the Orioles being able to make the case for their value as trade pieces. The only thing standing in their way was another thing that’s gone horribly wrong with the 2025 Orioles season.

The headline: Orioles trade Ryan O’Hearn and Ramón Laureano to Padres
The date: July 31
What we said:

If the Orioles raid of the 2024 Padres draft pays off, this is going to be a fun deal in the long run, no matter how much it hurts now. If it doesn’t, well, we’re familiar with the regrets of a fire sale not working out all that well, aren’t we?

The headline: Trade analysis: Grayson Rodriguez for Taylor Ward
The date: November 19
What we said:

This is a difficult pill for any Orioles fan to swallow who has been invested in Rodriguez’s success for the past several seasons. He was an exciting pitching prospect to have had in the system for several years while he developed, a consensus top 10 prospect in the game who seemed to have the potential to anchor the top of the rotation for years. That’s tough to let go. Even given that he hasn’t pitched since July 2024, there’s a natural reaction: That’s the best they could do, really?

The headline: Meet the new Orioles prospects
The date: August 1
What we said:

The Orioles have stuffed their lower ranks with prospects, many of them pitchers. In particular, many of them are prospects who don’t jump off the page, hype-wise, but are lately showing upward trends to make you think their value is underrated.

The headline: The Orioles are finally spending money, but in an unconventional way
The date: January 13
What we said:

(The Orioles payroll) represents a 50% increase from their end-of-year 2024 estimate … it is pretty clear that the Orioles have ramped up their spending in a way that few other teams have across MLB this offseason. Despite this fact, there is still a feeling of dissatisfaction across the Orioles fan base. Why? It’s pretty simple. The team is still missing the most important part of their offseason shopping list, and they seemingly refuse to commit to players long term.

The headline: The Orioles are trying to fix the stadium experience in all the wrong ways
The date: June 25
What we said:

What happened much more often was just random music played that filled up moments after players fouled off a pitch and there was extra time before the pitcher got a new ball and came set again. There is a basic problem with this: Noise does not equal excitement.

This article was in response to a piece from The Baltimore Banner that explained changes the Orioles were attempting to make to the Camden Yards stadium experienced based on apparently receiving a failing grade from an MLB consultant for crowd noise from a 2024 series against the Phillies. For starters, having been at one of those Phillies games, I reject the MLB consultant’s conclusion and I believe any attempt to follow recommendations that think that series was a bad example is at best misguided and at worst built on lies being knowingly told to fans to justify them.

The Banner’s article quotes Orioles business people who seem to view the challenge as creating more noise in the stadium. In and of itself this is not a bad goal, except that how they are pursuing it seems to be just playing more random, loud music that offers no opportunity for fan engagement in any way. Based on comments I’ve read from other people who have attended games at other venues – Yankee Stadium most especially, but not uniquely – this is a league-wide trend and I think it sucks. I hope it’s not much worse next year than it was this year. Since they’re upgrading the audio system this offseason, better quality audio of the new junk philosophy would not represent an improvement.

The headline: Cedric Mullins said farewell before struggling in New York
The date: November 10
What we said:

As the trade deadline approached, Mullins emerged as a player that could potentially fetch some value. His skills and limitations had been on display for several years in Baltimore, and he clearly had the potential to help a contending team in need of a speedy center fielder with some power. The New York Mets took the bait. The Mets sent three minor-league pitchers to Baltimore in exchange for the 30-year-old outfielder. Unfortunately, Mullins did not play to his full potential in The Big Apple.

This was from our series of reviews about individual players after the season was over. I would not have guessed before I pulled up the traffic report that any of our articles from this series would have been at the top for yearly traffic. Indeed, none of the other articles from this series cracked the top 50. One thing I’ve learned in my time doing this is that you never know what is going to get picked up by the search engine algorithm and you never know what’s going to happen if it does.

It’s no surprise there were plenty of Orioles fans still interested in reading something about Cedric Mullins. As Alex wrote in the above article, he was an easy fan favorite kind of player and the way the season progressed both for him and the team was sad. It was a bummer that he essentially had to be traded. Also a downer is that he was not good for his new team and the Mets didn’t even make the playoffs, so he didn’t get to enjoy that experience after having to go through getting dealt.

The headline: Orioles sign Pete Alonso for five years, $155 million
The date: December 10
What we said:

Entering this offseason, I did not believe the Orioles would actually do it. I figured Mike Elias’s talk about wanting to add a bat was just a smoke screen, that he might lurk around but not be serious. … The immediate rationale for the deal is obvious. The Orioles rather famously lacked a major power threat in their lineup in the 2025 season, with three players tying for the team lead at a frankly pathetic 17 home runs. This was, to some extent, impacted by them trading away players in July, but even so, it was sad. Now, they’ve got Alonso, whose seven-year MLB career has seen him hit home runs at a pace of 42 per 162 games.

This bit of news merited my using all caps on the front page link to this article: THE ORIOLES SIGNED PETE ALONSO (NO, REALLY). I still feel like yelling it out to the world. The Orioles did it! Alonso was exciting enough just looking at his career track record and thinking about how he’ll be able to add exactly what was lacking in the Orioles lineup this past season. After I watched his introductory press conference, where he described wanting to build a clubhouse atmosphere where players are ready to run through a brick wall for one another, I was ready to run through a brick wall.

Up until this signing, you could wonder if maybe Mike Elias was going to try to do the same thing this offseason that he’d done last offseason. That is, what Tyler wrote about back in January from the #6 article in this countdown: Spending a lot of short-term money without ever addressing anything long-term, or any of the short-term big needs. Trading for Taylor Ward and signing Ryan Helsley to a two-year deal where he can opt out after one year were both in that same vein.

Signing the Polar Bear? That’s something else entirely. And as we’re about to see as this list continues, it wasn’t the last aggressive move of December.

The headline: Orioles acquire Shane Baz from the Rays for four prospects and a draft pick
The date: December 19
What we said:

This past season was the first of Baz’s career where he started more than a half-season worth of games. Baz pitched a full season, making 31 starts. They weren’t good starts. His full-season results ended up at a 4.87 ERA, so in essence the Orioles have surrendered this bevy of prospects for a guy who was marginally better than Cade Povich, except also with no long-term track record of durability whatsoever. That sucks. Obviously, the Orioles think that they can get something better out of Baz. It is easier to join them in this belief after watching what happened to Trevor Rogers in the 2025 season.

I talked myself into feeling a little better about the Baz trade by the time I got to the bottom of this article because there really might be something in the fact that so much of what was bad about his 2025 results was oriented around pitching poorly at home. In 2025, home was Steinbrenner Field for the Rays. In a real sense, it doesn’t matter how Baz pitched in a minor league stadium that won’t be his home park now for 2026.

This is also a kind of aggression that we haven’t seen from Elias, paying a steep prospect price to get a player who he thinks will be able to help the team for multiple seasons. His biggest trade before this was getting Corbin Burnes, and that both only brought in Burnes for one year and only traded away recent post-prospects. I think it’s a good sign for the long term that Elias is going to be looking to cash out on his stock of prospects rather than just let more guys end up withering into nothing.

Even with Baz, the Orioles probably need another signing or trade to add into their rotation. I’m hoping for a high-end signing, and having seen the Alonso signing and the Baz trade, I don’t think that’s totally crazy as a possibility. But it hasn’t happened yet so it’s not one of our top stories.

The headline: Something is rotten and it’s not clear what the Orioles can even do about it

The date: April 23

What we wrote:

When we were all waiting through the crappy Orioles years for the star players to be drafted, develop, and arrive, the imagined combination of Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson turned out to be the big ones. It’s no coincidence to me that these two guys being on the scene and showing out as stars led the O’s to a 101-win season in 2023, and a just-as-hot pace over the first half of last year. The plan for Orioles success in 2025 ran through them. There was no other way.

So far, they ain’t got it. Rutschman is batting .200/.297/.375, while Henderson is hitting just .213/.250/.410. The only good thing there is to say here is that at least they’re hitting for power when they do hit it, but I don’t think there’s going to be any reversal of fortunes for the 2025 team unless these guys get it going.

At the point I wrote this article, the Orioles had played 22 games and were 9-13. The two most recent games had them on the wrong end of a couple of butt-kickings: a 24-2 loss to the Reds (that game’s recap, by the way, was #11 on this year’s traffic list) and a 7-0 shutout at the hands of the Nationals. There was no reason that the Orioles had to keep falling apart from this point. It was not guaranteed that injuries would continue to wrack the team the way they did, nor that players who were being counted on for star-level play just weren’t delivering.

The Orioles did fall apart, though. They went on a 6-15 run from this point that got Brandon Hyde fired as the manager, and they lost the first three games of Tony Mansolino’s interim tenure to end up at 15-32 before anything like improvement started to happen.

A better starting rotation never materialized even after Trevor Rogers arrived and started doing incredible things. Rutschman alternated between being hurt and hitting worse than he was through the first three weeks. Henderson improved, but was still disappointing with only 17 home runs. So much went wrong that it was hard to have any kind of hope for 2026.

To some extent, this remains true. Even after what the Orioles have done this offseason, a lot of their 2026 chances of success ride on incumbent players – also including Jackson Holliday, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser, and Tyler O’Neill, among others – being healthier or playing better (or both) than they did in 2025. At least we can all feel better about there being a different group of hitting coaches trying to guide these players to better results.

This was a crappy season for the Orioles. It was crappy in ways that were, if not inevitable, entirely foreseeable back before the season began. It continued to be crappy throughout in ways that were easily identifiable after only about four weeks of baseball. Many of our most-read stories of the year were about different aspects of that disaster.

Yet also, to my continuing surprise, Mike Elias came out of the season looking to address some of the deficiencies in aggressive ways. Those have also proven to be among our most-read stories, and they offer Orioles fans reasons to be more hopeful that 2026 will go better than 2025 did, at least for our favorite baseball team.