SARASOTA, Fla. — Last time I played telephone in the Orioles’ clubhouse, one reliever told me years ago to apologize to another for a weeks-old headline I hadn’t written. It turned out the reliever I apologized to hadn’t seen it but looked after I spoke to him, got mad once he saw it and proceeded to dress me down the next day.
I enjoyed this version much, much more.
“You see these postseason runs — it takes everybody. It’s not just the star players who can do it.
Shortstop Gunnar Henderson
A few months ago, in Orlando, new Orioles manager Craig Albernaz recounted his early calls with the team’s returning players. Albernaz said the feedback was almost uniformly about what the team needed to do better to win games, and he mentioned how all players, but young ones especially, “kind of lose sight of what makes team baseball, a team-functioning aspect of the game.”
That the players had the self-reflection and self-awareness to put the team first made Albernaz believe in the character and culture of the clubhouse he was inheriting, and it surprised him how consistent the message was.
I was surprised, too. And I wanted to know what it meant from the other side.
All of the players I spoke to agreed with the sentiment. To some extent, they remembered what they shared with Albernaz. They all agreed it wasn’t something they talked about as a group. Overall, the responses provided context on how they viewed last year — especially in relation to what came before it — and how they plan to turn things around.
“I don’t know if I said it or not, but the principle of it, the idea of getting 1% better every day and not taking anything for granted, is absolutely true,” catcher Adley Rutschman said.
That’s the most basic version available here. Others were more expansive, and it feels unfair to shortchange them. Here’s what they had to say.
Gunnar Henderson and I had only a couple of minutes before a team meeting started, which was a shame because he’s never been more expansive. He said he had “extended conversations” with Albernaz about how badly he wants to win, and he believes the rest of the group in the clubhouse feels the same.
“You see these postseason runs — it takes everybody,” he said. “It’s not just the star players who can do it. You watch the Dodgers; yes, their star players helped out, but it took their entire team making defensive plays and big swings at the end of the game. It’s every single person on your team, so you’ve got to build up everybody on your team and get everybody on the same page.”
Henderson pointed to a trait that the 2023 Orioles had and carried into the first couple months of 2024 before it disappeared.
He said: “No matter what the score is, we’re in it to win it — we knew we could win at any point in the game. I think we kind of took a little bit of that for granted last year, in the sense of going into a game and then just, even though we’re down like five runs, just thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to come back.’ No. You need to have that fire from inning one to nine, and if it happens in inning eight and nine, then it happens then. But you want to have that fire in innings one through six, because those runs you scratch across in one of those innings could be the difference between you winning the ballgame and losing the ballgame.”
Not having that feeling for an entire season, he said, “makes you appreciate whenever you’re going well and your team is bought in together, and makes you want to get to that point again. The desire that everybody has is to get to that point again.”
Ryan Mountcastle had a similar thought about what it takes to win games.
“Back in ’23, it just felt like guys were getting big hits in the big spots and, last year, just didn’t really seem like we could,” he said.
As the season went on, “the reality of the situation” set in, he said.
“We probably weren’t going to make it to the playoffs, so I don’t want to say anybody was going through the motions because everybody was still playing hard, but just being that little bit of extra locked in, especially when the games matter a little bit more.”
Colton Cowser doesn’t know if his message was word for word about the need to get back to team, to winning baseball, but he also acknowledged how different it was playing out the 2025 season. Instead of having a “winning, competitive mindset and having that mindset showing up to the field every day,” the Orioles’ reality was different.
“Down the stretch there, we had a different locker room every day, it felt like,” he said. “We were out of it, so we were just kind of showing up and playing baseball,” though he added they wanted to win for the coaching staff and he is proud that they did at the end.
Jordan Westburg focused more on the beginning of the season, when things weren’t going the Orioles’ way and it felt like nothing could change that.
“I more so remember giving him the message of, I feel like we kind of just, at one point in the season, it felt like almost we figured that we were entitled to winning — just with the amount of talent we had, and then the previous two years that we had,” Westburg said. “And to me it’s not that we forgot how to play winning baseball. It’s just we showed up every day and kind of expected it to happen, and then when it didn’t, it was like we got punched in the face and we didn’t know how to react.”
Jackson Holliday remembered praising his teammates and how things were in the clubhouse even in a down season, and he doesn’t remember if he addressed the need to play team baseball but credited whoever did say it with a “great answer.”
“I think we just kind of got in a rut at the beginning of the year, and team baseball is something that’s very important, especially early in the year, getting off to a roll,” Holliday said. “It’s something that we did struggle with, and the offense was good one night and the pitching struggled, then the hitting struggled when the pitching was great. It’s hard to win games like that.”
Holliday could tell early on that Albernaz and his staff were “going to emphasize playing winning, hard-nosed baseball,” he said.
“And I’m all about that.”
Banner reporter Andy Kostka contributed to this article.