BALTIMORE — After the Orioles’ final loss of a disappointing season, the club’s most important player answered questions one last time about how another year went wrong.

Gunnar Henderson spent the past six months frustrated, an emotion that bled through television screens after each strikeout, lineout and pop-up. After his MVP-caliber 2024 season, Henderson declined in 2025 and was due for a bounce-back season in 2026.

It never came.

During the season, Henderson was typically short with his answers about his underperformance. He never dodged questions or downplayed his struggles, but he didn’t reveal what he was working on or what was causing it.

When asked Friday night after the Orioles’ final game and loss of their 79-82 season, Henderson discussed the mental, physical and physiological reasons for his down season.

“I feel like a lot of it was, well, some of it, probably a little bit of doing too much in certain situations, just not allowing myself to take over and then me trying to force stuff to happen,” Henderson started his answer.

The 25-year-old shortstop later talked about minor swing changes he made, work he’s done with Pete Alonso, the challenges of having new hitting coaches in two straight seasons, and the minor wrist discomfort that hampered him before changing the knob of his bat. After hitting .270 with an .831 OPS over the first 500 games of his career, Henderson hit .226 with a .715 OPS this season.

Ultimately, for a player as talented as Henderson, the mental side of the game is an even bigger part of the battle at the big league level. He knows he should be the best player on the Orioles — an aircraft carrier, as baseball people say, capable of carrying a team across the finish line — and that adds pressure that his teammates (sans Alonso) don’t have.

But Henderson is learning how to handle that pressure and let go of the weight of being a superstar-caliber player, manager Craig Albernaz said.

“For Gunnar, it’s knowing that, especially with Pete now and being around Pete, Gunnar doesn’t have to shoulder the load. He can go out and be the best version of himself, and the best version of Gunnar is his ability to play baseball, his ability to run the bases, to play good defense, to hit the ball to all fields. He doesn’t have to be the sole guy taking on all the weight.

“When our team is functioning on all levels, everyone shoulders the weight. I think Gunnar’s in a spot now where he understands that.”

Despite his struggles, Henderson was still technically one of the Orioles’ best players, even if he vastly underperformed his projections.

FanGraphs estimated he was worth 3.6 WAR, second-best among Orioles hitters behind only Pete Alonso, and he hit 24 home runs while playing all but three games. He was the lone player on the Orioles — and one of 25 qualified players across MLB — to total positive value as a hitter, defender and base runner, according to FanGraphs. And he still had some of the club’s best single-game performances, like his three four-hit games that all resulted in victories.

“Obviously, a couple games here and there have showed it’s still in there,” Henderson said. “It’s not a matter of it just disappearing one day. It’s just the game. Obviously, the pitchers are getting paid too, and they’re getting paid to make adjustments to you and get you out. I feel like they did a really good job of making adjustments, and I just didn’t make that adjustment that I needed this year. But I feel like that helps me down the road, because once I tweak out those adjustments, then it’s going to be hard for them to readjust, and I feel like that’s when I go.”

But Henderson also spent the season working on his batting stance and getting his “swing feels” back in a good spot. Through the first three-fourths of the season, Henderson hit .211 with a .675 OPS — well below average. But he spent the final 40 games basically being the Gunnar Henderson of old with a .274 average and .845 OPS, striking out only 20% of the time while walking 12%.

“When I get to that point in the offseason, I’m excited to kind of go to work on that because I’ve felt a lot of good here recently,” he said. “It’s just a matter of putting that all together and being able to be confident in that. I feel like that’s something that is going to help me in the long run is being able to be ultra aware. I feel like working with Pete on some of that, just really being able to know what you’re trying to feel because a lot of it was just pure athleticism, and now I’m learning my body and how it’s supposed to move and what I’m looking for essentially.”

After the 2024 season, Orioles hitting coaches Matt Borgschulte and Ryan Fuller didn’t return. They were replaced by Cody Asche, Sherman Johnson and Tommy Joseph. None of them were retained after the 2025 season ended. Dustin Lind and Brady North were hired for 2026.

That makes seven hitting coaches in three years for Henderson and the rest of the Orioles’ young core.

“I think it’s more of just the, like, once you get with one for so long, then they know your swing and what kind of wires you and what makes you go,” Henderson said when asked if that has led to confusion. “It’s hard for guys coming in to learn all that, especially this year when I wasn’t there for a lot of spring training. It’s hard to make big-time adjustments when you’re in the middle of a game or before a game and trying to go up there and face 98-99 [mph] every night. It’s really hard to do that during the season. … It’s just kind of that balance of really taking the time, using your time optimally, and working very optimally.”

Albernaz said before the Orioles’ doubleheader Friday that Henderson is better set up for 2027 because he will have a healthy offseason and a full spring training after missing a large chunk of 2026 camp at the World Baseball Classic. But the skipper did say that Henderson was “playing banged up, just like everyone.”

After Friday’s doubleheader, Henderson was asked if he was dealing with anything physically this season like he did last year when he played through a shoulder injury that wasn’t revealed until the offseason.

“I mean —” Henderson said before pausing and considering how to answer.

“I know you don’t want to make excuses,” the reporter replied.

“I really don’t like making excuses because everybody’s banged up at this point in the year. But yeah, I mean, I had a little wrist issue going on,” Henderson reluctantly said. “But felt like the bat/knob changes helped that out. It was just a matter of getting that a little bit better, but yeah, like I said, everybody’s banged up at this point in the year. It just sucks that it happened. It is what it is.”

Henderson said he dealt with wrist discomfort for about half the season and won’t need surgery this offseason. Albernaz said during his end-of-season news conference that changing to an axe handle “towards the end of the season” helped Henderson. Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias said Henderson “handled that particular situation about as well as you could.”

Henderson is far from the Orioles’ most glaring issue entering this offseason. The sloppy play overall, the defense and the lack of offensive production in the outfield are all bigger problems to solve. But Henderson returning to the player he was before this season is a prerequisite if the Orioles want to return to contention in 2027.

©2026 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.