What went wrong with the 2026 Orioles, according to their players

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Orioles players filed into the clubhouse at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, and somebody closed the door. Blaze Alexander looked toward Pete Alonso and Chris Bassitt, thinking one of them would lead the discussion just days after the trade deadline in early August left the team shaken.

Rather, it was Carlos Narváez who stood up. The catcher had joined the organization a few days earlier. He was the lone major leaguer included in the five-player package the Boston Red Sox sent for cornerstone backstop Adley Rutschman, and Narváez had something to say.

Narváez, perhaps unknowingly, identified issues that have plagued the team as its once-promising rebuild foundered.

The Banner spoke with 10 players to try to piece together where Baltimore’s 2026 season went wrong.

Narváez requested the team meeting — he cleared it with manager Craig Albernaz and veteran slugger Pete Alonso — because his new team reminded him of his old one. That group had turned its season around, thanks to a candid discussion during a rough stretch earlier in the season.

“He was like, ‘Hey, I’m new here, I’m not trying to step on anyone’s toes,’ but he knew what we had here,” Alexander recalled. “He’s telling us from playing us on the other side, this is a really good f---ing team, and basically going over the stuff Boston was doing. They were really out of it, finding a new coach, and he said, ‘F--- everyone. The players, it’s up to us.’”

Narváez was repackaging the message he’d heard in June with Boston, when leaders called a meeting following a series loss to the Colorado Rockies. The message Narváez heard in Boston was, “We going to fix it or are we going to keep complaining?”

Boston rattled off 20 wins over the next 22 games and is now in the postseason.

Perhaps Narváez’s message was delivered too late to help the Orioles. Maybe players did not embrace the message in the same way. Or roster construction issues, injuries and lack of attention to detail rendered it moot in the end. But the message from Narváez helps open a door to understanding the Orioles’ 2026 predicament.

No rousing speech could change bare facts: Shoddy defense meant the Orioles allowed the most unearned runs in all of MLB. The team’s 25% strikeout rate was the third-highest in the majors. The Orioles also didn’t win four straight games until July.

The team’s flaws could not be fixed with exhortations or calls for introspection.

Narváez’s meeting was one of four or five players-only meetings, members of the Orioles said. His message, coming from such an unlikely source, may have found one of the root causes of Baltimore’s underperformance.

“I said, ‘I care about my stats, of course, but if you care about your stats, you forget about winning, you get frustrated, you won’t figure out things. Play for the guy next to you. Play to win. And then everything will turn around and by the end of the season, you’ll see you fixed that, you fixed this, because wins fix everything,’” Narváez said. “That was the whole message of that. Trying to bring that energy up.”

Narváez hit on themes others had noticed. Some players said there was a lack of fire at times — the sort that can galvanize a team through difficult stretches.

“First half of the season, really, I feel like we were all waiting for it to happen, waiting for all of us to figure it out, instead of coming together, naming the issues and addressing it from there,” Alexander said.

Added left-hander Trevor Rogers: “We hit kind of a tough spot [in the middle of the season]. No one really said anything, it was just a feeling, like, ‘Are we as good as we thought we were?’”

Rogers answered that with his next breath, with conviction: Yes, they are. But why didn’t the Orioles show it, then?

“We were all kind of waiting to go on a run,” Rogers, who is set to become a free agent, said. “It was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be one game, one series of events that are going to go our way and we can go on a run.’ … We couldn’t get that level of consistency throughout the year to really pad ourselves when there is a tough spot in the year, because it’s going to happen over the course of 162 games.”

The Orioles finished their second straight losing season at 79-82, and for a second straight season, players and president of baseball operations Mike Elias pledged to learn from it, to improve, to make next season better.

From the heights of 2023 and 2024 — when the Orioles won a combined 192 regular season games yet couldn’t win in October — Baltimore has fallen hard. Last year, it cost manager Brandon Hyde his job. This year, the first under Albernaz, didn’t go much better.

“We need to do a better job as players,” Alonso said. “That’s what it boils down to. At the end of the day, you can have all the help, all the coaching, all the information, but it’s about getting it done between the lines, and collectively as a group, we didn’t do that.”

Albernaz and Elias are returning, however, and they’re promising change. Some of it has already arrived in the front office, with Sig Mejdal no longer overseeing analytics, and vice president of player development Matt Blood departing.

And Albernaz’s staff implemented more pregame infield drills during the season to correct sloppy play.

But right-hander Chris Bassitt, a veteran who has seen these sorts of franchise turning points before, said the effort must go beyond anything Elias and Albernaz can implement. Bassitt, 37, is a pending free agent. Yet he met with Albernaz, Elias and other key decision-makers to offer feedback on the season, his first in Baltimore.

His message? The Orioles must learn how to win, which means setting standards. That must start at the lowest reaches of the minors.

“I think the most impactful and important changes for this organization going forward is the people like Shane Baz, [Kyle] Bradish, Pete Alonso, Gunnar Henderson to walk into a room next year with the entire minor league system, especially coming from Gunnar, who’s been through this minor league system, and say, ‘Hey, I know what we’ve done in the past. But what we’ve done in the past is not good enough. And we are about to make some small changes, some major changes, some things that are non-negotiables, some things that are not going to be tolerated anymore,’” Bassitt said. “That’s an already agreed-upon thing between Mike and Alby and the pitching coaches and hitting coaches and players in here.”

It’s not clear when that process begins, especially with the threat of a lockout looming over the 2027 season.

Bassitt told Alonso earlier this season that it’s “very, very, very difficult, if not impossible, to come in year one and make drastic organizational changes.”

Alonso, the Orioles’ most expensive free agent signing in history, organized a handful of team dinners. He talks hitting with teammates, and his postgame work in the cages and the weight room is an example for others to follow. Alongside Albernaz, Alonso is one of the “outside voices” Elias said he’s seeking input from as the organization evaluates its inner workings.

Alonso completed one of the best seasons of his career by leading the American League in home runs (43) and RBIs (113). He became the first player in MLB history to lead the National League and American League in RBIs in their career.

Alonso almost dragged the Orioles to the postseason by himself. Bassitt knows the star first baseman can’t do it alone.

That’s why Bassitt met with members of the front office and Albernaz this season, and it’s why some of his ideas will be implemented, with the help of Alonso, Henderson, Baz and Bradish.

“When you have those guys walk into a room and say, ‘Hey, these changes are coming from us,’ I think that holds a whole hell of a lot more weight when Mike and Alby and the minor league coaches and all that make disciplines and things like that, and making changes to how they’re coaching,” Bassitt said. “For whatever reason, players always want to fight coaches, and players always want to fight front offices. I understand the reasons some of the times.

“But when Gunnar Hendersons and Pete Alonsos walk into a room and say these rules are because I said what these rules are, then who are you going to fight? Are you really going to try to fight Pete Alonso and you’re going to try to fight Gunnar and Shane and whoever else is in the meeting? Come talk to me then. Because we know what works and we sure as hell know what doesn’t work.”

And what Bassitt saw from the Orioles at times this year did not work. He said he noticed some players going through the motions during workouts and drills rather than taking them seriously enough to actually bring about change.

“As dumb as it is, all the little things. Rules off the field, rules on the field. Baserunning rules, hitting rules, your work, your game preparation, your lifts. Whatever it may be. Pick the subject, there’s rules for it,” Bassitt said. “And a lot of them are very simple. Some may be complex. But overall, I think you just sit there and you’re like, a lot of the time you’re just trying to go over there and check a box, and I see you guys do work, and it’s not good enough.

“All of a sudden the games happen and you’re trying to check a box, and guess who’s not checking a box? The teams that are in the playoffs. They’re not checking boxes,” Bassitt continued. “They’re actually putting in real work to try to win games. And so, again, the growth is going to come from those guys.”

Alexander agreed with Bassitt’s assessment. When defensive miscues happened, Alexander said, there wasn’t enough recourse early in the season.

“You could say it happened too late, holding people to that standard,” Alexander said. “We kind of gave some games away early on, you know? Everyone was trying to settle into the season, but those are the games that come back to bite you.”

They did. Far too often, mistakes proved costly.

“We’d find ways to lose games, whether it was a stupid error or dropped pop-up, just dumb things that can’t happen when you’re trying to win games,” said infielder Jackson Holliday. “That’s something we learned as a team, and going into spring training, we’ll definitely clean up. Shoot, just thinking about little mistakes late in games.”

As one player who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid said, “You were almost waiting for the mistake to happen” in close games.

“We have to do better finding different ways to win ballgames,” Rogers said. “We have power. That’s not an issue. How can we do a better job of holding runners, stopping a runner from advancing an extra 90 feet, moving guys over, stealing, quality defense? We had really good spurts of that during the year, but we also had spurts where we didn’t play clean, fundamental baseball.”

That was a repeated sentiment all season, and at the end-of-season press conference Monday with Albernaz and Elias, Albernaz said he heard all of his players in individual meetings express their desire to play more cleanly.

Henderson said the key to improvement will be better mental focus, not solely repetitions. Albernaz pointed to how frequently the Orioles went through infield drills before games this season, which is “not commonplace.”

“For them to kind of go outside their comfort zone was, I was impressed by it, and I know my staff was forever thankful, and it [paid] dividends for us,” Albernaz said. “That’s one little thing that we did to kind of shore up the execution in the moment.”

Still, lapses occurred too often late in the year. For instance, after Baltimore reached .500 with a win against the Rockies on Aug. 31, errors played key roles in two subsequent losses. Then they were steamrolled by the Red Sox in four games, which all but ended the Orioles’ season.

As one player said, again speaking anonymously to be candid, the four-game sweep by the Red Sox was an embarrassingly low moment. The Orioles showed a lack of fire during that series, and it cost them.

But as Baltimore’s players disperse for the winter, there is also a strong belief that the window for contention remains open. Henderson, his teammates believe, will fulfill his potential. The rotation, with Bradish, Baz and Young returning, appears to be in good working order. Alonso is here for four more seasons.

“We have talented players here for a very long time,” said Rogers. “How can we take that next step to get back to where we need to be? That’s the million-dollar question, right?”

Bassitt thinks he has the answer.

It rests on the shoulders of influential players. And while Elias and Albernaz are necessary in evolving the Orioles’ culture, they can’t do it without the players leading the way.

“I think players in this room have got to grab the reins and responsibility of what it takes to be a big leaguer who really wants to win,” Bassitt said. “When they do that, the minor leagues better follow, because if they don’t follow, it’s really easy to replace a minor leaguer. And honestly, to be quite frank, it’s really easy to replace a big leaguer, too, that doesn’t want to do stuff to help the team win.”