Step 1: Don’t swing at pitches that will break your hand.
Last year was something of a tale of two seasons for Orioles outfielder Colton Cowser. There was the regular season, when he would have been the AL Rookie of the Year if the voters for that award had been paying attention to the season. Then there was the postseason, in which Cowser, batting with the bases loaded, struck out swinging at a pitch that hit him and broke his hand. Failure in baseball doesn’t get much worse than that.
The postseason failure was not exactly an unrepresentative experience for Cowser. In crucial batting situations in the 2024 season, he performed at a lower level than he did the rest of the time. In 96 plate appearances tagged “high leverage,” Cowser batted a combined .176/.208/.242. That’s really bad! More broadly, in the split with runners in scoring position, he OPSed just .643. Not as bad as the specific higher leverage one, but still not very good.
Perhaps the easiest path for Cowser to improve on his 2024 would just be to find some approach that better serves him in those situations. (Or, if it was a lot of colossal bad luck, to have better luck.) Cowser avoiding a sophomore slump isn’t one of the most-talked about storylines heading into 2025 but it’s probably still a piece of the puzzle that needs to fall into place for the Orioles to get farther than where they’ve stalled out two years running.
What is to be expected from Cowser this year? Here’s projected batting numbers from two of the big systems, ZiPS at FanGraphs and PECOTA at Baseball Prospectus:
- ZiPS: .252/.340/.426, 19 HR
- PECOTA: .230/.320/.391, 18 HR
The gap between these two projected sets of numbers spans the difference between another pretty good season for Cowser and a more disappointing one. The ZiPS projection sees Cowser with an improved batting average and OBP at the expense of a little power. I would take that in an instant. PECOTA shaves points off the 2024 batting average while keeping the OBP about the same, and drops a lot of power. It’s hard to envision a successful 2025 for Cowser if he loses 50 points off the slugging percentage.
For the purpose of this series, we’ve been using ZiPS as the comparison number. I like ZiPS because it’s freely available to the public and because its creator and maintainer, Dan Szymborski, grew up in the Baltimore area and has good opinions about pit beef sandwiches.
The case for the over
Purely in terms of the OPS number, Cowser was better than this projection last year, with a .768 OPS. This was not a number that came along with too many concerns in the batted ball data. Cowser’s flaws were apparent: He swung and missed a lot, both in and out of the zone.
An optimist about Cowser might look to the new Orioles hitting coaches being able to do some work with Cowser to address this weakness. If he is able to make contact more often while continuing to do about the same amount of damage when he does make contact, Cowser could be in line for an even better sophomore season.
Here’s another thing: With a cromulent righty-batting fourth outfielder in the form of Ramón Laureano, Cowser’s batting numbers might be dragged down less by having to face lefty pitchers, which he did in 146 PA a year ago.
The case for the under
You have to think, essentially, that Cowser’s ignominious postseason plate appearance will become a career-defining failure, that he will never be able to recover from that and of course he’s going to slip even further from last year’s numbers. Perhaps you don’t think Cowser will be able to hit at least 24 home runs again; if he slips into the teens, like both ZiPS and PECOTA think, that hit to the slugging will be tough to make up in OBP to keep him above the projected number.
Or maybe you’re just feeling glum and considering that in a closed system, there will always be more entropy. Cowser could be afflicted by “this guy will be worse than he was last year for no reason that anyone would have predicted ahead of time” the same as any other Oriole could be. This fact is no less true just because it would be no fun at all.
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The 2024 season for Cowser saw him do incredibly well in two months, do more or less okay in three months, and pretty bad for one month. That added up to a solid rookie season. Is that going to be the norm for Cowser? Streaky periods kind of like the outfielder who just left in free agency, Anthony Santander? Or will he settle in to become a more consistent performer?
My wife joked to me the other day that the Orioles marketing department needs Cowser to continue to be a good player because they need all the easy cow-related tie-ins that they can possibly get. The actual on the field team could probably use him to be good too because this team is going to need to score a lot of runs and that’s going to take as many good hitters as they can muster.