It was far from a perfect weekend of baseball, but we did learn a few important things about the 2025 Orioles.

The Orioles’ first series of the season is in the books.

It wasn’t perfect. They split the games, after all. But in general, it felt good. You will take winning two out of four on the road against a division rival, especially with some of the significant injuries that the O’s were dealing with.

Maybe it’s because we are used to football season when every game feels huge, or simply because the content machine demands to be fed, but it is customary to have big reactions to a microscopic sample size of regular season baseball this time of year.

Either your team is on track to winning it all, or they should already consider tearing it down.

Of course, this is madness. Only so much can be gleaned from a few games against a singular opponent. But we would be remiss to do no analysis whatsoever. So, let’s examine a few aspects of the Orioles that we learned about these last few days in Toronto.

The offense looks very similar to 2024

This makes sense.

After all, the Orioles offense is made of basically the same players from a season ago. Apart from swapping in Tyler O’Neill for Anthony Santander, this is the same crew.

But the offense’s struggles in the second half are well-documented at this point. It’s not that they were “bad,” but they were nowhere near as explosive as they were to begin the year.

Perhaps that would have been reason enough for the Orioles to enter 2025 with a revamped approach. So far, that does not seem to be the case, which is not a bad thing. On the whole, these Orioles scored a lot of runs a season ago, and the results so far in 2025 are promising.

Over the weekend they hit 10 home runs. Only the Yankees (15) and Dodgers (12) have hit more.

They are third in slugging (.525) percentage as well, behind the Yankees again (.804, lol!) and the Diamondbacks (.543). They managed this without Gunnar Henderson, by far their most dangerous offensive weapon.

Jackson Holliday looks better…but is still learning.

Much of the talk during spring training focused on Holliday. The former top prospect is coming off of a tough rookie campaign.

He reportedly spent the offseason bulking up and getting faster, and by all accounts had a great camp in Sarasota. Through one long weekend of regular season baseball, he looks like an improved player.

Holliday has already hit his first home run, and is 4-for-15 overall. He stole a base, and has jumped back and forth between the two middle infield spots. It’s not overwhelming stuff, but it is the look of a productive big leaguer.

At the same time, he has struck out seven times in four games.

That’s an ugly K-rate of 43.8%. That number should come down pretty quickly as both Holliday’s chase rate (20.6%) and whiff rate (29.4%) are fine. He is going to take his share of strikeouts, but the current rate is mostly a mirage.

There is less to takeaway from his defense early. It’s tough to bounce between two positions so frequently. Once Henderson is back, Holliday will settle back in a second base.

There was one hiccup in the opening weekend where he failed to cover second base on a potential double play, but that could have also been the result of a team decision on shifting the infield.

For better or worse, the rotation is what we expected

Four of the Orioles’ five starters got work in this weekend. Only one of them had what you would consider a “good” outing.

That was Zach Eflin. He went six innings and held the Blue Jays to two runs on Opening Day. The other three were a mixed bag.

Charlie Morton did well for three innings and then fell apart. Dean Kremer gave some length with his 5.1 frames, but also coughed up five runs.

Tomoyuki Sugano may have been on his way to a nice debut, but cramps ended his day after four innings.

None of these were disasters, but they could have gone better. The Orioles still won Kremer’s start because the offense hit three home runs and got to face the Toronto bullpen for six innings. It could be a similar story throughout the summer.

The current iteration of the rotation has a fine floor, but limited upside. It will be on the offense to actually win the games.

Hopefully that dynamic shifts a bit as the season ages, and both Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish return to the mound. Or maybe even Mike Elias will eventually get the ace he has coveted all winter.

Félix Bautista is back, but not all the way.

The Orioles really missed their closer last summer, especially in the second half. They lost games they probably would have won if Bautista was healthy. Having him back in the bullpen this year is a relief.

The Mountain made his long-awaited return over the weekend. He pitched a scoreless ninth inning, working around two base runners, and striking out three. It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress.

There is not a whole lot of data to analyze. He pitched one inning.

But he do know that his sinker averaged 97.3 mph this weekend. In 2023, he was averaging 99.5 mph on the very same pitch.

This difference in velocity has been noted throughout spring as well, and is not terribly surprising given the injury that Bautista is recovering from.

There are two paths from here: Bautista is still ramping up and will get close to the velocity he had two seasons ago by some point in the year. Or, this is how hard the current version of Bautista now throws.

Both options can be successful, but one has more wiggle room.

We will just have to wait and see how it develops. Most importantly, Bautista needs to stay healthy. Even a slightly diminished version of himself is crucial to the success of the 2025 Orioles.