One of the many disappointing aspects of the 2025 Orioles roster was the fact that no one hit more than 17 home runs for the team. Gunnar Henderson was one of the three players who tied with 17. After hitting 37 the year before, it was a big drop-off. Calling in to the Orioles Hot Stove Show on the team’s flagship radio station last night, Henderson revealed that he was dealing with a previously-unreported shoulder impingement “pretty much for three-quarters of the year.”
Orioles fans have been through
this routine very recently, as one year ago there was a lot of time spent wondering what happened to Adley Rutschman in the middle of the 2024 season. What’s different about Henderson’s case here is that Rutschman never actually acknowledged any specific injury. We must also hope that Henderson’s follow-up effort will be better, since Rutschman’s batting numbers only sank further in 2025 even with an offseason to heal up.
On the impact to his performance, Henderson said, “I could never get to the point that I wanted to get to with my swing … Just had to play through it and felt like I still with all those circumstances put up a decent year.” He’s right, and that’s another difference from the Rutschman thing. Although it feels disappointing as a sequel act to Henderson’s 9+ win season from 2024, Henderson did really push through whatever challenges he was facing to put up a decent year, batting .274/.349/.438 while stealing 30 bases.
This is the second “actually, this guy was secretly hurt” narrative that we’ve gotten for the 2025 team, as far as I’m aware. Towards the end of last season, we also got hit with Colton Cowser playing through broken ribs suffered in a collision with an outfield wall in June. He said that, although it did not impact him during games, he was unable to do the kind of between-game work that he would ordinarily do.
Cowser’s batting from July 1 onward sure hints at something going on: He batted just .182/.259/.333 over his final 66 games. It made for a real letdown season compared to his runner-up Rookie of the Year performance from the prior year. If you can ignore our recent Rutschman experience to talk yourself into Cowser having a bounce-back and Henderson lining up for another monster year, don’t let me stop you.
In Henderson’s case, the season was bookended by poor months at the plate. The sub-.700 OPS in March/April can probably be explained more by some impact from the issue with his oblique that cropped up during spring training and cost him most of the warm-up time he would have gotten.
Henderson also sagged back below a .700 OPS for September, but was otherwise good-to-great in his overall batting numbers for most of the season. He says he was battling the shoulder impingement for about three-quarters of the season. That would seemingly include a month of June where he dropped a .902 OPS and July where it was .881.
That’s some great hitting, and on its own doesn’t point cleanly to some kind of issue. The home run power was absent, though, as he only hit five homers across 52 games between those months. It may be that the shoulder impingement cost him particularly in lefty-lefty matchups, as he pulled just a .603 OPS against fellow southpaws after putting up an .829 OPS the previous year. We’ll see over the course of this year how much he’s able to get back to the elite performance he established two years ago.
One good thing about the Orioles moves this offseason is that the team hasn’t bet everything on Henderson bouncing back to be the chief power hitter. They made the huge signing of Pete Alonso, who has a 42 home run per 162 game pace for his career. The trade for Taylor Ward, who hit 36 homers a year ago, also figures to add some thump to the lineup. Some of the pressure is off of the returning players who collectively disappointed us last season.
