The Orioles capped off the first half of the 2025 season Friday night with a bang. Many of the 80 previous games ended with a whimper.

Baltimore is 35-46 at the midway point of the season. The Orioles are in last place in the American League East and 12 games back of the first-place Yankees. They are seven games back of a wild-card spot, but they’d have to leapfrog seven teams to get there.

Here are five things we’ve learned about the Orioles through the first half of the season:

Baseball is as humbling a game as there is: No one expected this. Even the club’s most ardent detractors would not have confidently predicted the Orioles would be 11 games under .500 through 81 games.

But here they are.

Thirteen months ago, it would not have been unwise to conclude that the Orioles’ front office had this whole baseball thing figured out. The Orioles had baseball’s top-ranked farm system with the No. 1 overall prospect for each of the past three seasons. After beating the Yankees 17-5 in the Bronx, they were 49-25 after going 101-61 the year before.

It seemed easy. Almost too easy.

Since, the Orioles have been mediocre at best and bad at worst. They’re 77-92 since that win at Yankee Stadium. They have the third-worst record in the AL this year. The injury bug continues to bite. Barring a miracle turnaround similar to Friday’s miraculous comeback win, the Orioles are barreling toward being sellers at the trade deadline.

“You go back to last June, we were on top of the sport in almost every facet of the sport, including majors and minors, and now we find ourselves where we find ourselves,” general manager Mike Elias said in May. “This has been hitting us all very hard but it’s unusual for that to be so sudden, and I’m in the process of very heavily evaluating everything that we do across the organization that pertains to the front office, analytics department, player development. You name it, we’re looking at it very hard.”

Elias, Sig Mejdal and the rest of the Orioles’ front office likely knew a year ago that it wasn’t always going to be as easy as it was in 2023 (sans the postseason, of course) and the first half of 2024. If they didn’t, they surely do now.

Brandon Hyde was neither the cause nor the fix: Hyde was fired six weeks ago. It feels like six years.

Firing Hyde was never going to be a panacea. The team continued to crater after his ouster, one that was not something the general consensus of the clubhouse wanted. The Orioles finally stopped the free fall and have gone 19-12 over their past 31 games. If they continue that pace (.613 winning percentage) the rest of the season, they’ll finish with 84 wins and still likely miss the playoffs.

As the Orioles floundered to begin the season, calls to fire Hyde from a portion of the fan base grew louder. The majority of these fans knew this would fix little, but they wanted recognition from owner David Rubenstein and Elias that something was wrong. And in Major League Baseball, when something is wrong, the manager usually loses his job.

“Sometimes organizations try something different and that’s what this was,” Elias said in May.

There are situations when a manager loses a clubhouse and it causes the season to spiral. This, the players said, was not one of those instances.

However, that does not absolve Hyde of fault. He was not able to prevent this team from sliding into the abyss. The wins and losses ultimately go on his resume. The team has played better since he was fired, and the caveats that it’s been likely a result of regression or players getting healthy won’t be printed on the 2025 Orioles’ Baseball-Reference page.

But this sport is about the players, not the former ones coaching them. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way.

The injuries are the main culprit, but it’s much more than that: Imagine a pie. Make it blueberry or apple or pecan, it doesn’t matter. Now divide it into slices corresponding with the reasons (injuries, the offseason, the rotation, underperformance) the Orioles are on pace to lose 92 games.

The largest piece of that pie — undoubtedly — is the injury one.

The following players have spent time on the injured list this season: Adley Rutschman, Gary Sánchez, Ryan Mountcastle, Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Westburg, Ramón Urías, Jorge Mateo, Colton Cowser, Cedric Mullins, Tyler O’Neill, Ramón Laureano, Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, Tyler Wells, Zach Eflin, Cade Povich, Trevor Rogers, Brandon Young, Chayce McDermott, Albert Suárez and Andrew Kittredge.

This is not normal. It is unlucky, and it’s not an excuse to say so.

However, that’s clearly not the whole story. Before Friday’s outburst, the Orioles were nearly no-hit in three of their previous five games. They blew an eight-run lead in Tampa. They lost 19-5 to the Red Sox and 24-2 to the Reds. They have the AL’s worst rotation with a 5.31 ERA to go along with a bottom-10 offense.

The piece of that pie that’s most concerning, though, is the one that questions whether the Orioles’ core — the group of young prospects who were supposed to maintain this championship window — is now as good as once thought. Elias staked this franchise’s future on those players’ shoulders, and it’s uncertain whether that was the right decision.

It’s too early for such a proclamation for a group of players this young. The bullish cases for most of them are more compelling than the bearish ones. But it can’t be denied that as a collective — whether a result of injuries, bad luck, underperformance or all of the above — this group has not lived up to expectations over the past 12 months.

Here’s one thing we learned about these 10 Orioles players: There’s not enough space to write out every tiny thing we’ve learned so far this season. But here are 10 quick hits:

The way Jackson Holliday started his MLB career was concerning. But as interim manager Tony Mansolino said this month, it was “silly” how some people put as much stock into what was a small sample size for a 20-year-old. Holliday’s numbers aren’t amazing, but he’s settled into the leadoff spot and is ascending.

Rutschman having a bounce-back season felt likely as he impressed during spring training. But a combination of bad luck, a slump and an injury has made the 2025 season another underwhelming one for the two-time All-Star.

It can be easy to see a player in his late 20s or early 30s and assume that’s all he’ll ever be. Ryan O’Hearn, who keeps getting better and will soon be an All-Star, proves that’s not true. No player’s future is predetermined.

In 2024, Henderson and Rutschman were seen by many as a tier above Westburg and Cowser. This season has illustrated that Cowser and Westburg might be just as important to this team as Henderson and Rutschman. Cowser and Westburg left holes that couldn’t be filled when they were injured.

Heston Kjerstad has always been a great hitter, but the big leagues are filled with pitfalls. Kjerstad will likely be a good hitter in the majors again (like he was in 2023 and 2024), but that will likely come as a designated hitter.

Rodriguez is far from the only pitcher struggling with arm injuries right now. But the way his season has gone should inform how we view pitching prospects moving forward.

Yennier Cano’s downturn is a reminder that the performance of most relievers is fickle from year to year. Cano was an All-Star in 2023, and now he’s back in Triple-A.

On the flip side, Bryan Baker’s rise is a reminder that many relievers are just a tweak or two away from being effective.

There’s still time for the Orioles to win the Trevor Rogers trade if he keeps pitching this way.

A starved fan base has grown impatient: For the first six years of the Elias regime, the direction was clear. The rebuild was painful, but brighter days were ahead. Once they arrived, the Orioles spent two seasons as the AL’s winningest team.

That’s why this season has felt disorienting. If the 2025 season, the heart of the World Series window, is a bust, it puts the entire framework into question. Should the Orioles have done more from 2022 through 2024 to win? Can this team be a contender in 2026? Or is the window closing?

This was not what fans agreed to when signing the social contract with Elias and the Orioles during the rebuild. The organization asked the fan base to wait patiently as the front office intentionally put a losing product on the field, because once the rebuild ended, the Orioles would have everything needed to compete for championships. The 2023 season was magical, sure, and 91 wins in 2024 are nothing to sneeze at, but all that’s come out of one of the worst four-year periods in MLB history are zero playoff wins and now another losing campaign.

In that way, it’s not hard to understand why this fan base — as starved as any in MLB — is perhaps grouchy about the state of the ballclub. However, impertinence is better than ambivalence. Another month of mediocre baseball and then a fire sale at the trade deadline, football season will start in August in Charm City.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer @baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.