By all accounts, the Baltimore Orioles have been colossally disappointing this season.

The Orioles won the AL East in 2023, were a wild card team last season, and most thought that Baltimore had one of the more exciting young cores in all of baseball heading into the 2025 season. Instead, the Orioles slipped on a banana peel to start the season and are only just now starting to play a bit better.

As a result, it is completely fair to consider Baltimore among baseball’s bigger disappointments in 2025.

However, normally very mild mannered MLB expert Jayson Stark recent wrote for The Athletic that the Orioles are actually the “disappointing team of modern times” and that requires a bit of a closer look.

Jayson Stark kind of has a point about the Orioles’ brutal 2025 season so far

Now, if this was Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee, or Skip Bayless, it would be easy to write off as just another shoutcaster being bored with shouting about football and just wandering into a discussion about a sport that they haven’t watched in years.

However, this is Jayson Stark who has been one of baseball’s greatest cheerleaders over the years and a guy that doesn’t throw around criticism blindly like far too many analysts these days.

However, Stark does kind of have a point here. Yes, there are other teams like the Braves (okay, especially the Braves), Rangers, and Diamondbacks that have been disappointments this season.

What makes the Orioles stand out is that they had all of these young guys like Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday, and Colton Cowser that were supposed to carry them. Instead, all of them except Holliday took steps back this season and the front office didn’t actually build a starting rotation worth having.

The good news is that the Orioles are playing better right now and could still put up a respectable season.

Being 12 games back in the AL East feels like an ambitious goal to overcome, but if Baltimore keeps playing well, they could narrow their 7.5 game gap in the AL Wild Card race and at least make things interesting there. Unfortunately, that will do little to mitigate the disappointment of this season given how much promise it initially had.