Jon Meoli: Craig Albernaz’s approach to helping Gunnar Henderson offers a blueprint for turning the Orioles around, too

A smash-and-grab win over the Yankees on Monday was a small dose of tonic for the Orioles, considering the trauma caused by their visit to the New York earlier this month.

It was the type of win that a team in their spot needs when, even a quarter of the way through the season, things haven’t quite clicked yet. It’s all about doing enough to get by before things get good, and that’s true for both the team and its most dynamic star: shortstop Gunnar Henderson.

Henderson started the season looking like he was back to his best. He had six homers in his first 14 games, peaking at that point with a .963 OPS. But as the power dried up and the strikeouts mounted, his OPS has fallen to .674 through Monday’s game.

As the Orioles push through a pivotal month full of division rivals and do so without much margin for error in the standings, Henderson’s struggles are exemplary of how manager Craig Albernaz and his staff can guide their best player — and the team at large — back on track.

Albernaz, who is leaving the heavy lifting to the hitting coaches, sees his role as holding bigger-picture talks with Henderson and the other players.

“To be honest with you, being in this position, the internal battle that I fight is trying not to micromanage, and also let our coaches coach — the perception of micromanaging, I should say,” Albernaz said. “I love to coach. I love to help. So it’s balance in letting our coaches coach and also not thrusting myself into every aspect of the game.”

Still, Albernaz said, he wants his office to be one where players can come in and “say what’s on their mind, to get off their chest what they’re thinking,” and Henderson has taken advantage of that often this year to chat about his defense, baserunning and hitting. He sees himself as a different voice, one that’s outside the trenches relative to those specific aspects of the game.

When Henderson does speak to the hitting coaches, according to hitting coach Dustin Lind, the message is one of selectivity and patience.

“The biggest thing for him is just the expanding the zone, and not controlling the zone quite the way that he has in his best years,” Lind said Sunday. “For him to get back to a more patient and stubborn approach and really keying in on the pitch that he’s trying to drive, I think, is going to really give him the results we’ve become accustomed to seeing in the past.”

Henderson’s pull-heavy approach, as evidenced by his heavy rotational swing and spiking pulled fly ball rate, means he’s been susceptible to balls on the outer half of the plate. Most of his underlying stats are similar to the last two years on pitches on the outer half of the plate and beyond, though there’s some poor batted ball luck — he’s batting .110 with a .217 expected batting average and has a .164 slugging percentage against a .293 expected slugging percentage on those pitches.

But the overall expanding of the strike zone — his chase rate was 35% entering Monday, up from 27.7% in 2025 and 23.2% in 2024— is in many ways undermining his offensive approach overall. He’s not doing as much damage, and the quality of contact when he does make it isn’t what it has been in the past.

This is all correctable, though. Like so many on the Orioles’ roster, Henderson not only has the talent but the aptitude for such an adjustment. And it’s on Albernaz and his staff to find the balance of at once reinforcing what has gone well and what needs to change, without over-indexing either.

“He’s in a great space,” Albernaz said. “Speaking for Gunnar, he’s so competitive, and he wants to do well for the team, not for himself. We always want to bank on that, that player coming out of it, because he’s doing it for the right reasons. He’s not doing it for his arbitration number, he’s not doing it for an All-Star nod, or whatever the case may be, he’s literally doing it to help the team win and just to be better for his guys. So every time he leaves, it’s a great conversation, and no matter what Gunnar is going through and how he’s playing, I always feel awesome that he’s up at the plate at the right time. I love putting him in at shortstop every game, so that does not change.”

The viability of this approach, just a quarter of the way into Albernaz’s first season in charge of the Orioles, is going to be tested. Challenging stretches of baseball like this team has been in tend to test pretty much everything. But from early in camp, this has been the tone he’s tried to set with his coaches and players: empowering them at all levels to do what’s best and helps the team win on a given night.

That’s an easier message to send in February than it is to practice in the middle of May, when it feels like for every success story on this roster there are two players trying to find their way. For Albernaz, who is still in the early stages of his managerial stint, deviating too much from that approach, even if it helps in the short term, could undermine what he wants to build here.

On some parts of the roster, there are alternatives. Without being able to count on Colton Cowser or Tyler O’Neill consistently, the Orioles have pivoted to Leody Taveras and Dylan Beavers.

But there’s no one on the team like Henderson. At his best, there aren’t many in all of baseball who can do what he does. And that’s what the Orioles need him to be right now.

They might still be searching for a consistent winning formula as a team, but Henderson hitting at a high level feels like a required input in any possible one they can dream up. The extent to which Albernaz and his staff’s approach works with Henderson will define whether it works for this Orioles season at large.