Spring training has not been kind to the Orioles infield. In the first week, Jackson Holliday and Jordan Westburg both went down with significant injuries and are each projected to miss most of, if not all of April. Losing two everyday players for an extended period raises many questions.
The most pressing question is, can the Orioles withstand losing these players? Once you get past that question, though, there are also questions about what these injuries mean for Westburg and Holliday and their future with the team. If you try to answer those questions, you run into more questions about what these injuries mean for the players who will be playing in their stead.
It’s a tangled mess, and for today’s blog, we’re going to try to carefully examine the Orioles infield situation and untangle it a little bit.
Can the Orioles withstand these injuries?
The short answer is yes. Thanks for reading!
In all seriousness, the reason I am optimistic that these injuries won’t spell disaster for the Orioles is that their lineup is deep enough that even in the worst-case scenario, where Westburg never makes it back, and Holliday is a shell of himself (and the shell of a 1 WAR player is not a pretty site), the Orioles lineup is deep enough that they should still be able to have one of the best offenses in the league.
I’ve had my qualms about the way that the Orioles front office has gone about their offseason. One of my criticisms has been that they had acquired more offensive talent than could fit onto the roster while ignoring the issues with the pitching staff.
I still have my issues with the pitching staff, but the Orioles surplus of offensive talent is already coming in handy. So 1 point to Mike Elias, I guess. Whatever. I’m not owned. Stop saying I’m owned!
Let’s take the “worst case scenario” I outlined above and make it worse (you might be tempted to say, “if you can make a worst case scenario worse, then it wasn’t the worst case scenario,” and that I would say stop being a cop). Let’s say Westburg and Holliday are both out for the rest of the season, and Coby Mayo can’t hang at third, and so the O’s are forced to patch together second and third base with Blaze Alexander, Jeremiah Jackson, and whatever various minor league infield depth guys they end up needing, a la Payton Eeles.
In that scenario, the Orioles projected lineup would be as follows:
- Gunnar Henderson, SS, L (MVP Candidate)
- Taylor Ward, LF, R (36 homers last year)
- Dylan Beavers, RF, L (Consensus top 50 prospects in baseball)
- Pete Alonso, 1B, R (The 155 million dollar man)
- Adley Rutschman, C, S (please be good again)
- Samuel Basallo, DH, L (consensus top 10 prospect in baseball)
- Jeremiah Jackson, 3B, R (dawg)
- Colton Cowser, CF, L (Some contact issues but legit 30 homer pop)
- Blaze Alexander, 2B, R (hot guy)
Even without Westburg and Holliday, it’s still the kind of lineup that should make you want to say awooga!
Not to mention that Tyler O’Neill, Ryan Mountcastle, and Coby Mayo would all be on the bench in this scenario.
Because the Orioles have been so flush with position player talent over the last few years (to the point where they’ve had to make consolidation trades to get excess players off the roster), it’s easy to forget that most teams go into the season knowing that about a third of third lineup on a given day is just going to be miserable at the plate. The Orioles will be ok if they have to give regular playing time to one (1) glove-first player who struggles at the plate.
Losing Westburg and Holliday would be a massive bummer, and it would lower the Orioles ceiling as a contender, but the Orioles are one of the few teams that could lose players this important and still roll out one of the best offenses in baseball.
Now let’s come back from worst-case-scenario land. In the real world, Jackson Holliday should be back by mid-April, and the Orioles are telling us that Westburg should be back in early May. So all this yapping I’m doing about how “the Orioles would be fine without Westburg and Holliday” might be completely pointless. Three months from now, those guys might just be in the lineup, killin’ it.
So let’s talk about each of those guys.
Jackson Holliday
I’ll start with Jackson because his situation is the most straightforward. The hamate injury he suffered seems to have a pretty standard recovery time. It has been interesting to see how the Orioles have talked about Holliday’s potential availability compared to how the Diamondbacks and the Mets have talked about Corbin Carroll’s and Francisco Lindor’s availability.
Those three players all had surgery around the same time, but the Mets and D-Backs have both put it out there that their guys could be back for opening day, while the Orioles immediately said that Holliday would miss opening day and set the date for his return for mid-April.
It’s possible that Holliday’s injury was a little different than Carroll and Lindor’s in a way that makes the recovery longer, but the simplest explanation would be that the Orioles are being extra cautious, which I think is smart.
The reputation of hamate injuries is that even after the player is considered healthy enough to play, the lasting impact of the injury is that may take weeks or months before the player gets their power swing back. If having Holliday take it easy for a couple of extra weeks means that when he comes back, he won’t be significantly hampered by the injury, then that’s the best thing to do.
Holliday’s career so far has been a tad underwhelming. Last season was seen as a big step forward for him, but he still finished with an OPS+ of 95 and complemented the below-average offense with bad defense.
Still, he’s only 22, younger than many of the Orioles prospects. Amidst his struggles last season, he flashed some of the potential that made him a consensus number 1 prospect. He’s got real power, great plate discipline, and he’s a good athlete. He has the tools; he just needs to put them together. Which is what this season is such a big year for Holliday and the Orioles.
If Holliday takes another step forward this year and hits 20+ homers with a solid OBP and improved defense, then the Orioles could feel like “OK, we’ve got a set it and forget it second baseman for the next few years”.
On the other hand, another season of below-average production at the plate and continued struggles on defense, and the Orioles will have to consider upgrading at his position. So this is an important season for the Orioles to evaluate their young infielder.
The Hamate injury throws a wrench into that evaluation. If Holliday gets off to a slow start and underperforms, it will be hard to determine whether his struggles are just him continuing to be a bit overwhelmed by the big leagues or the result of the injury.
From the team’s perspective, you’d hate to give up on Holliday after a bad 2026, and then when he gets to his next team, find out that he was just hurt and you moved on too soon. On the other hand, even knowing about the injury, it’ll be hard to watch another underwhelming year and then say, “I feel great about Jackson Holliday being our second baseman next year”.
I would like to see Jackson Holliday make a leap and become the player he has the potential to be, so hopefully, the extra recovery time the Orioles are giving him makes it so that this injury doesn’t derail his whole season.
Jordan Westburg
I remember when Jordan Westburg was first coming up, and someone said that he was a Nick Markakis/ JJ Hardy type guy, and I thought to myself, “oh so he’s going to be my favorite player ever?!”
Westburg has done as well as anyone could have asked to reach those lofty expectations, which is why it’s been so hard to watch as he’s had three straight seasons cut short by really frustrating injuries. Up until now, it’s been mostly freak things. A hand broken by a hit by pitch, a finger broken by sliding into a base, an ankle rolled rounding second, etc. This injury is much more serious.
A partial tear of the UCL is basically a ticking time bomb that, when it goes off, results in as devastating a surgery as an athlete can endure, Tommy John.
How the Orioles and Jordan Westburg are choosing is intriguing to me. Rather than go ahead and get the surgery, which would fix the issue but would force him to miss the entire season, they are instead opting for him to get a PRP injection, rest for a few months, and then try to resume playing.
From what the Orioles have shared with the media, this partial tear is something that Westburg has been dealing with for a long time (In my reading of various articles, the phrase being used is “chronic”, which sounds bad to me but is apparently better than “acute”), and getting surgery may not be necessary at all.
As a baseball fan, my experience with partially torn UCLs has been that the player typically ends up needing surgery. I know Westburg isn’t a pitcher, so his situation is different from most cases of partially torn UCLs, but I have a hard time believing that Westburg is going to get this injection and then this will be the last we hear about his elbow.
That’s what Mike Elias is saying is possible, though, and they did consult a doctor, so I’ll take them at their word that this is a possibility. If it’s possible, the surgery is entirely avoidable, I can see why they would try to avoid it.
So overall, I think their chosen course of action makes sense, but I do have some concerns about the potential worst-case scenario that this plan brings into play, which simply having the surgery would eliminate.
Here are some of the different scenarios that I could think of.
Getting the surgery now scenarios
He misses the entire 2026 season and returns fully healthy in 2027.
Obviously, missing the entire 2026 season is a bad outcome, but with this option, it guarantees that by the time the 2027 season rolls around, Westburg’s elbow will be fully healed and he’ll be able to have a normal season, assuming another body part of his doesn’t explode.
Getting the PRP Injection Scenarios
Everything works
The best-case scenario is that the injection works perfectly and Westburg returns as a DH in early may and at some point during the season, he is able to play second base and eventually even third base. Then, when the offseason rolls around, it turns out he doesn’t need surgery, and he gets to have a regular offseason. Beautiful.
The injection works perfectly for 2026, but he needs surgery after the season
This is basically the same as the everything works scenario, where he can play the field normally in 2026, but the main change is that he does end up needing surgery at the end of the season, and the rehab process makes it so he misses the beginning of the 2027 season, or he has to DH for the first half of the 2027 season. If Westburg can be productive during the 2026 season, then it would probably be worth it to potentially compromise the beginning of his 2027 season.
The injection kind of works, and he needs surgery after the season
The main difference in this scenario is that, upon returning from the injection, Westburg is never cleared to play the field and is limited to the DH role. Obviously, the Orioles will take what they can get from Westburg in 2026, but if he can’t play the field, having him as a DH complicates an already crowded position group. Right now, Samuel Basallo, Adley Rutschman, Tyler O’Neill, Ryan Mountcastle, and Coby Mayo are all in the mix for DH at bats. So someone is going to be disappointed.
This is kind of the worst-case scenario. The issue is that, as a DH only, Westburg is limited as far as how much value he can provide, and if he has to get surgery at the end of the season, which makes him a DH for the start of 2027, now you’ve sacrificed parts of multiple seasons to get a part-time DH. At a certain point, it would be better to just miss the entire 2026 season if that meant the Orioles get their third baseman back in 2027.
The injection doesn’t really work, and Westburg gets surgery in May
This is essentially the same thing as just getting the surgery now. No harm, no foul if this is what happens.
So, as you can see, the plan the Orioles are going with has much more upside than just getting the surgery now, but I do worry about the scenario where the Orioles ruin two Westburg seasons trying to make it so that they don’t lose him for one.
Anyway, they’ve already made up their minds, and they didn’t ask me, so fingers crossed the injections work to perfection, and he just never needs surgery.
The other question related to Jordan Westburg is: Is he officially injury-prone?
It’s a tough question. To me, putting the “injury-prone” label on a player means that it’s bad business to go into a season relying on that player to play a significant role on the team. It puts them in a category where the attitude when it comes to the player is “If we get something from that guy, then great, but don’t plan on it.”
I take labeling someone as injury prone serious becuase to me that label is permanent. Once a player is “injury-prone,” I’ll never advocate for the Orioles to sign or extend that player. Tyler O’Niell is a good example of this. The Orioles should not have signed him, and what happenedin 2025 surprised nobody. If you read everything I’ve written this offseason, I’ve never once put O’Neill in a hypothetical lineup. I’m not going to do it; he doesn’t exist to me.
When it comes to Westburg, I’m not going to put that label on him just yet. Enough of his injuries have been things that “happened to him” that I’ll give him a pass for now. Most people’s hands break when they get hit by a 95 mph fastball; that’s not a Jordan Westburg problem. That being said, the committee in charge of labelling players as injury-prone has him on their watch list, and any further shenanigans will likely force their hand.
Coby Mayo
If I were Coby Mayo, I would be pretty frustrated with how the Orioles have handled the first few years of my career. The two things that prospects typically need in order to be able to make the jump from the minors to the majors are regular playing time and a definitive position to work on. The Orioles have given Coby Mayo neither.
Last spring training, he mostly worked out at third, then in May, the Orioles decided he’s going to be a full-time first baseman, and he didn’t even look at third base for the rest of the season, and now, less than a year later, they’re asking him to get back and play third again. Getting jerked around like that has to be frustrating.
Frustrations aside, though, Mayo has a real opportunity here. If he can play good enough defense at third this spring training, the Orioles will most likely give him the nod as the everyday third baseman to start the season. The soonest Westburg can be back is May, and he might not make it back to third base all season. Mayo is looking at getting his most consistent playing time as a Baltimore Oriole.
The key is the defense. He doesn’t have to be a gold glover; he just has to play well enough that the downside of the defense doesn’t outweigh his productivity on offense. If he slashes .301/.393/.548, like he did last September, the Orioles would probably put up with some pretty bad defense. If he puts up more modest numbers like the .223/.316/.424 he put up in the second half of last season, then his defense would have to be close to, if not above league average, for the Orioles to keep him in the lineup.
It’s not an easy situation to be in. Mayo is not a gifted defender, and he no doubt knows that his defense at third is going to be heavily scrutinized and, if it falls below a certain level, will be the reason he’s back on the bench, hoping to get a DH day against a lefty, or worse, back in the minors.
There will be a definite mental hurdle to overcome, and it’s a real possibility that Mayo either doesn’t earn the third base spot out of camp, or if he does, it goes so poorly in his first few weeks than when Holliday returns that Blaze Alexander eats up most of the third base starts.
The upside, though, is quite high. Mayo rose to the top of prospect lists purely on his ability at the plate. He flashed that ability late last year, and if he’s able to keep up that momentum in early 2026, he has enough offensive talent that even with his poor defense at the end of the year, he could put up a 3-4 WAR and make it so the Orioles don’t miss Westburg that much. I don’t think that’s especially likely, but that upside is there with Mayo in a way that it just isn’t with Blaze Alexander or Jeremiah Jackson or veteran free agent X.
If Mayo can’t take advantage of this situation, I don’t know what the Orioles will do to him. His trade value sinks lower and lower the more he plays in the majors without catching on, and it’s possible that years from now we’ll look back and think that it’s crazy they didn’t trade him in 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026.
The Dishwasher 
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