For a team with this much speed, the Orioles sure keep making running look hard.
That’s the uncomfortable truth hanging over Baltimore’s baserunning right now. The numbers do not say the Orioles are the literal worst team in baseball at it, but they do paint a picture of a club that keeps giving away outs, missing chances, and turning routine aggression into self-inflicted damage.
FanGraphs has Baltimore at -1 in Base Running Runs, which puts the team 19th in the majors. That’s not a disaster on its own.
But it starts to look a lot uglier when you stack it against the roster. Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday, Leody Taveras, Dylan Beavers and others all bring real foot speed.
Blaze Alexander is on the roster, after all. And yet the Orioles keep playing like a team that doesn’t know when to go, when to stop, or how to get the most out of a runner already in motion.
The stolen-base numbers tell part of that story. Baltimore is succeeding on steals at a 71.6% clip, which ranks 25th in baseball.
That’s below the range most analytics departments treat as break-even, so the team is losing value every time it gets caught. The Orioles also sit at -1 in steal value at second base, good for 27th, and are at -4 in extra-bases taken, which ranks 20th.
In plain English: they are not consistently turning singles into first-to-third advances or doubles into runs the way a good baserunning team should.
Gunnar Henderson has become the clearest example of the problem. He’s a dynamic player with power and speed, but his baserunning decisions have become a nightly talking point.
He has seven steals this season and has been caught stealing four times. Getting picked off twice in one game is not being treated as a freak occurrence anymore; it’s starting to feel like part of the pattern.
The issue stretches beyond Henderson. Jackson Holliday is still viewed as a 25-steal type down the road, but his career success rate is just 68%.
Colton Cowser has been caught stealing twice and has only four successful steals. Dylan Beavers has been thrown out twice and has three steals.
Blaze Alexander has been caught three times in 12 attempts, which leaves him just under average. Even with that group, Leody Taveras leads the team with only 10 steals, which says plenty about how little the top of the roster is actually running.
And then there are the plays that never show up neatly in a single stat line but still leave a mark. Baltimore has repeatedly struggled with the contact play, especially when trying to score runners from third on balls hit in the grass.
Jason La Canfora described the Orioles as “a Little League team with the contact play trying to score runners from third with the ball hit in the grass.” That may be harsh, but it gets at the messiness of what’s happening.
Too many runners are getting thrown out at third or at home on plays that should be routine productive outs or sacrifice situations.
Blaze Alexander has been part of that problem, too. He has the speed to matter on the bases, but he keeps getting erased at third because he is not reading the ball well off the bat. Whether that comes down to judgment, awareness, or coaching, it is the kind of issue that should be fixable during the season through repetition.
So no, the Orioles are not technically the worst baserunning team in baseball. But they are bad enough in enough different ways that the distinction almost doesn’t matter. Between the stolen-base inefficiency, the pickoffs, the failed advances, and the extra outs at third and home, Baltimore keeps looking messy on the bases.
That messiness matters even more because it sits alongside a defense that ranks in the bottom five in outs above average, runs prevented, and defensive runs saved. The Orioles are giving away runs in more than one way, and none of it requires a brand-new roster to clean up. It requires better decisions.
La Canfora put the blame squarely on the people in charge, and he didn’t exactly soften the point: “Remember, Elias got promotions for himself and 16 other people after years of utter failure here, and now we get to watch an even worse product, with an even more befuddled skipper at the wheel, careen toward the All Star break and another inevitable firesale at the trade deadline with 1983 feeling like 1963 to those of us old enough to remember that last World Series parade.”
That’s a brutal line, and maybe the harshest read of all this. But the broader issue is hard to miss. For a front office that values athleticism and a coaching staff that is supposed to be sharp on the details, the Orioles keep looking like a team that is losing the small battles over and over again.
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The injury came after he was hit by a pitch in the seventh inning against Kansas City, and the aftermath added even more edge to an already tense moment. Baltimore now has to sort through the ripple effects while Alexander waits for further evaluation during the All-Star break, leaving the Orioles to manage a key piece of their roster without knowing how long they will be without him. [Read more 🡒]