Gunnar Henderson entered the majors with the kind of production that forces people to start talking in superlatives. In a 34-game cameo in 2022, he barely had time to introduce himself. Then 2023 hit, and he exploded: an .814 OPS, 6.1 bWAR, American League Rookie of the Year honors, a Louisville Slugger Silver Slugger at shortstop and an eighth-place finish in MVP voting.
He wasn’t done. Henderson followed that up in 2024 with 37 home runs, an .893 OPS, 8.8 bWAR, his first All-Star selection and a fourth-place finish in MVP voting.
By the time he was 23, he had nearly 200 RBI, almost 70 home runs and 15.8 bWAR. His 13.4 fWAR ranked sixth among shortstops before their age-24 season in the expansion era.
He looked like baseball’s next elite shortstop.
That’s what makes the slide so glaring.
2025 was the first sign that Henderson might not be on a straight line upward forever. His bWAR dipped from 8.8 to a then-career-low 5.4, and his home run total fell from 20 to 17. Even so, a .787 OPS kept that season in the realm of a minor detour rather than a true problem.
2026 has been much harder to explain away. With less than two weeks left in the season, Henderson’s bWAR has been cut in half to 2.7.
His OPS sits at .703, his batting average is .221, and his OPS+ has dropped from 155 in 2024 to 99 in 2026. The power is still there in spots - he has 23 home runs - but the rest of the profile has thinned out.
His doubles are down to a career-low 26, and the overall line just doesn’t resemble the player Baltimore built around.
That downturn is why ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle named Henderson the Orioles’ biggest disappointment. It’s a tough label, but not an unfair one.
After what Henderson had already shown in his first two seasons, the expectation was that 2026 would be the year he climbed back toward that elite level. Instead, the opposite happened.
The timing has only made the Orioles’ situation look worse. Baltimore reached the playoffs in 2023 and 2024 with Henderson hitting at a high level.
In 2025, his drop-off matched a team-wide step back, and the Orioles finished with 75 wins and missed the postseason. In 2026, Henderson has slid again, and Baltimore is once more on the outside looking in, with only an extremely weak American League keeping the conversation alive.
Henderson isn’t solely responsible for the Orioles’ decline. But when a player who once looked like a franchise centerpiece starts trending the wrong way, it changes everything around him. Baltimore is feeling that now, and it’s why the Orioles need him to find his form.
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