The Orioles may have found a real answer at shortstop down the line, and his name is Wehiwa Aloy.
Baltimore grabbed Aloy with the 31st overall pick in the 2025 draft, and the fit made sense from the start. He was the reigning Golden Spikes Award and SEC Player of the Year winner, a player viewed as a top-20 talent who somehow was still sitting there late in the first round. For an Orioles front office that has shown a clear preference for proven college bats, especially ones who can handle premium positions, it was an easy call.
Aloy has done little since turning pro to make that look like anything other than a strong one. He got a 20-game look at Delmarva last summer and hit .288/.356/.500, enough to convince the organization he didn’t need to return there this season.
From there, he spent 2026 split between High-A and Double-A and kept producing: .288/.358/.506 with 25 home runs, 92 RBI, 84 runs scored and 20 stolen bases in 23 attempts. That effort earned him the Brooks Robinson Minor League Player of the Year award in the Orioles system.
The power is the part that jumps off the page. Aloy hit 15 homers with Frederick and then added 10 more with Chesapeake, giving him 25 across 123 games.
That’s a serious total for any prospect, and it looks even louder when you remember the position. Not many big league shortstops are going to finish a season with 25 homers.
The bat, though, hasn’t come without swing-and-miss. FanGraphs noted that “elevated chase likely contributed to a draft day fall.”
The same report described him as “whiff prone” in the minors. His strikeout rate did tick down from 27.8% last year to 26.5% in 2026, but it climbed back to 28.5% in Double-A, so that remains part of the evaluation.
What does not seem to be in much doubt is where Aloy will play. MLB Pipeline says, “Despite fringy speed, Aloy should be able to stick at shortstop given his smooth actions, reliable hands and strong arm, and his range and instincts allow him to project as at least an average defender up the middle.”
FanGraphs offered a similar view, calling him “a plus athlete with an athletic build, a plus arm, above-average range, and average hands. He struggles some with hot shots, but otherwise looks like a pretty clean shortstop fit.”
Baltimore appears to agree. Of the 109 games Aloy played in the field this season, 90 came at shortstop and 19 at third base. That kind of usage says plenty about how the organization views him.
Of course, shortstop in Baltimore is not exactly open right now. Gunnar Henderson is still there, and despite his struggles this year, he is not moving off the position anytime soon.
He is also under team control only through the 2028 season, and the chances of an extension sound slim. That leaves room for Aloy to be the “shortstop of the future” if things continue on this path.
That future is not expected to arrive in 2027. The Orioles want to compete next season, which means keeping Henderson in place.
Aloy has only 39 games of Double-A experience and still needs more time to sharpen his game. He may show up in major league spring training games, but his regular season should start back at Chesapeake.
If he keeps handling each step, a Triple-A stop should come next, and his big league debut is likely to land sometime in 2028.
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