The Baltimore Orioles’ 19-5 loss to the Boston Red Sox on Friday is as jarring a result as regular season baseball gets. A playoff entrant in each of the past two seasons and the home of arguably the American League’s most decorated and exciting collection of young talent, the Orioles hardly profile as a team that would allow 13 runs in a single inning and lose a game by 14 runs to a division rival.
The result is emblematic of the Orioles’ disastrous start to the 2025 season. Expected to contend for the league pennant (and a possible World Series title), the Orioles have been baseball’s most disappointing team through the regular season’s opening months. Baltimore fired manager Brandon Hyde, the AL Manager of the Year in 2023, on May 17 and currently rank 14th out of 15 American League teams — only the lowly Chicago White Sox are worse.
But in a clear example of the truism “it could always be worse,” the Orioles aren’t the most miserable team in the majors. The Rockies are the clear leader in that distinction. Through the season’s first 50 games, Colorado is 8-42, which is the worst start to an MLB season since 1904. They are the only team in the NL West with fewer than 26 wins and are the only team in the MLB to have a negative run differential lower than negative 100 (their current mark is -159). Like the Orioles, the Rockies fired their manager, Bud Black, on May 11 after nine uninspiring seasons. I saw them beat the Cy Young winner Chris Sale and the Atlanta Braves in April, and that may go down as the most unlikely sporting event I ever witness.
Misery loves company, and the worst two MLB teams by run differential have a similarly disgusted taste in their mouths. And for both ball clubs, the notion that the season still has four more months seems like a threat to their fanbases.
But don’t let their place in the standings, mounting losses and managerial firings fool you. With seasons this abysmal, questions like “how did we get here?” and “is there anything left to salvage?” replace the typical conversation starters about playoff contention and lineup construction.
Based on the answers to these pressing questions, the Orioles are hardly company for the Rockies at all. In the scope of their contention timeline, Baltimore’s start can very well be a hitch in an upward trend, even if the manager who brought them out of the doldrums, Hyde, has been removed from the dugout. Colorado is in another stratosphere of misery, and not just in terms of altitude.
Baltimore took the baseball world by storm in 2023, rising from the ashes of 100-loss seasons to run away with the American League’s best record and establish itself as a World Series contender. The Orioles’ young core hasn’t parlayed its regular season gains into playoff success, as Baltimore’s playoff trips in 2023 and 2024 culminated in a single playoff victory in five games, and 2025 became about avoiding that plateau and taking advantage of a wide-open American League.
Well, Orioles fans need not worry about a plateau in 2025 — “crater” is a better word to describe what has transpired in the Charm City. The departure of ace starter Corbin Burnes in free agency has exposed a below-average rotation that has only one regular starter under a 4.80 ERA. The Orioles’ lineup is in the bottom third of the majors in runs, walks and stolen bases, while ranking in the worst third in strikeouts. Catcher Adley Rutschman has struggled to bounce back from his 2024 regression at the plate, and even shortstop Gunnar Henderson, the Orioles’ best player, has seen his numbers take a step back after a prolific 2024 season.
Baltimore is 11 games out of the last American League wild card spot and 14 games out of the AL East lead. With an interim manager at the helm and a shaky pitching staff, do the Orioles have a late-season rally in them?
Even if 2025 isn’t salvageable, the Orioles’ best days could be ahead of them.
General manager Mike Elias figures to have another opportunity to address the roster in the offseason, and if Baltimore’s disappointing approach and returns from last winter spur change, the Orioles could take major steps forward in building a playoff-worthy rotation and bullpen. Baltimore’s bats are young and will give the O’s room for internal growth. Second baseman Jackson Holliday, the top overall pick of the 2022 MLB Draft, has become a legitimate threat at the plate in his age-21 season, and the Orioles’ two superstars, Rustchman and Henderson, are 27 and 23, respectively. Baltimore won’t spend as much as the Mets or the Dodgers to attract the offseason’s biggest names, but the Orioles’ treasure trove of prospects and payroll flexibility ensures they’ll have every opportunity to shape themselves back into contenders in upcoming seasons.
Optimism is almost nonexistent along Blake Street in downtown Denver. Compare the Orioles and Rockies head-to-head, and Baltimore holds the advantage in every department: pitching statistics (Colorado is dead-last in ERA, strikeouts and WHIP), batting statistics (Baltimore has a clear advantage in batting average, homers and on-base percentage despite the Rockies’ hitter-friendly park and altitude) and farm system (Baltimore 15th, Colorado 18th). The Orioles have made the postseason in the past two seasons; the Rockies have two playoff appearances in the past 15 seasons, and none since 2018.
Statistics can’t capture the state of Rockies baseball as well as the images from the season can. During the Rockies’ homestand against the Atlanta Braves in April, the Coors Field bleachers had significant and rowdy patches of red and blue on hand to witness blowout Atlanta wins in the first two games. Advertisements for a Rockies-Yankees series promoted the Yankees’ Aaron Judge as prominently as any Colorado player. Yesterday, I saw an anchor on the local news pull out a box of tissues to help her get through a segment about the Rockies.
A key difference between the Orioles and Rockies is that the Orioles had legitimate playoff aspirations and have fallen well short, while the Rockies were expected to finish in the bottom of the NL West and have fulfilled that projection. But Colorado is on pace to be the worst team in baseball history and is making national sports talk shows for all the wrong reasons. Between franchise cornerstone Charlie Blackmon’s retirement, another quiet offseason, Black’s dismissal and the mind-numbing losing streaks, the Rockies have been bombarded by non-stop bad news.
Beyond this season, the Rockies are hampered by two factors: their abundance of deficiencies and their lack of resources to address them. Colorado is not a big market team that can spend its way out of problems like the Mets and Rangers in recent seasons, and their eternal rebuild and high picks in the draft has yet to yield a top-10 farm system to provide the major-league club with an influx of young talent. If the Orioles thought they had it difficult in revamping their pitching staff, try building one tasked with pitching in the elevation and in the expansive Coors Field dimensions, in a division with four playoff-worthy teams.
The Monfort family, the Rockies’ owners, took a bold step in firing Black after nine seasons, which was shocking not because of its timing early in the season, but because the past losing seasons had not cost Black his job already. But the manager was not the main problem in Colorado. Returning the Rockies’ roster to playoff contention caliber will be a multi-year effort at the very least, but if Colorado hitting rock bottom in 2025 is enough to spur serious change and reevaluation within the Rockies’ organization, a flirtation with the worst type of MLB history-setting could be a very positive outcome for the season. But that positive light depends on the Rockies’ commitment to change and to excellence, and the tall task of converting change into tangible improvements.
2025 has not been kind to the Orioles and Rockies. Whether it’s a freefall out of playoff contention or national notoriety for losing, these teams have emerged as the defining storylines of the early months of the MLB regular season — even more than the legitimately great MLB teams. For all their similarities, these situations aren’t created equal, and the Rockies’ road to relevance is much steeper than the disappointing, yet promising, Orioles.
Camden Yards might see a winner again soon. For Coors Field, the appeal is all about the mountain views, ballpark food and visiting superstars, rather than the Rockies’ own merits, until the franchise commits to a new approach and a new era.
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