ANAHEIM – It hasn’t been the start to the season that the Orioles’ offense was expected to have. 

The Birds have scored five runs or more just a dozen times in the 38 games they've played so far in 2025. They’re 10-2 in those games, an almost maddening statistic considering the fact that five runs isn’t an incredibly high bar to reach. Baltimore has just struggled to get there. 

“Unfortunately, the start of the season had been more down than up,” hitting coach Cody Asche said today. “There’s no hiding behind that.” 

Entering this afternoon’s Mother’s Day rubber match against the Angels, the Orioles rank 27th in baseball in hits, 28th in walks, 26th in batting average, 26th in on-base percentage and 20th in OPS. 

None of those numbers are incredibly encouraging, especially considering the talent in this lineup that has produced much better numbers in the past.

Among those talented players is Adley Rutschman, who sported an OPS over .800 in his first two seasons in the majors. The former No. 1 overall pick has seen some of his struggles from the second half of 2024 carry into the new season, as he’s hitting just .195 with a .295 on-base percentage and .615 OPS on the new campaign.

“It’s a difficult position to be in as a hitting coach because you can look at the underlying stuff and you see that it should be better,” said Asche. “But at the end of the day, results are results, and the scoreboard tells a different story.” 

Rutschman takes his work toward getting back to his old self one day at a time. 

“The great thing about being Adley Rutschman’s hitting coach is that he shows up every single day with a mindset of ‘Hey, I’m going to get this right. What do I need to do today?’ He shows up for his teammates, he shows up for this team, he shows up for this org in more ways than one,” Asche said. “We’re working through it with minor adjustments daily.” 

Rutschman is far from the only young star struggling. 

Among O’s with at least 50 plate appearances this season, the catcher is ninth on the team in OPS. Jordan Westburg is just one spot better, and Gunnar Henderson is sixth. It’s not the numbers you were expecting from three of your All-Star representatives from a season ago. 

“We have a group of guys that are really, really talented,” Asche said. “You’ve just gotta keep helping them learn from the failure, and I think that's a strength of what we've done in our hitting development with the Orioles. The postgame feedback loops, the postgame breakdowns of what happened, the post-at-bat breakdowns of what's happening. So that when they do fail, they happen less often in the future because they're learning from their mistakes, and our guys are really good at that. They're really, really good at that. Our young players are really key to it.”

Those young players, more often than not, make up a majority of Brandon Hyde’s lineup each day. This season, that inexperience has led to some pressing and zone expansion. It leaves plenty of room for growth. 

“You’ve got to learn from your teammates more than you're going to learn from your coaches if you're going to be successful in this game,” Asche noted. “If I look back on my career, I learned 90 percent from the guy who played second base with me in Philadelphia. I don't remember a lot of the messaging that I got from the hitting coaches. That's just a matter of fact.

I see Jacks (Holliday) at the iPad when a new pitcher comes in, or after an at-bat, or maybe he faced the guy the day before and he's explaining the slider shape. That's incredible. The kid’s barely got a year under a service belt and he's explaining to Gunnar what the slider does. It's hard to do. So, I see a lot of growth in that capacity and it excites me.” 

The O’s offensive struggles won’t be fixed with one swing. Asche knows that it’s his responsibility to make sure that these issues are temporary. 

“We haven’t gone through this as a group,” he said. “We’ll be stronger for it. Hopefully, I’ll get to talk to you guys in a couple of months, there’s a different tone to this interview. As of right now, we have a lot of work to do.”