Ample off days and the shortest road trips in franchise history highlight the Birds’ 2025 slate.
As the Orioles prepare to kick off the second half of the 2024 season tonight, they can also start making plans for 2025. MLB released the 2025 regular season schedules yesterday, and the Orioles’ slate is…kind of awesome, actually. Considering the schedule challenges that the O’s have faced in recent seasons, there’s a lot to like about next year’s setup.
1. The Orioles’ road trips are the shortest in franchise history.
The O’s will have 14 road trips in 2025, one more than this season, but none of the road trips will last longer than seven games or take them to more than two cities. That’s never happened before in O’s history. Excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the Birds have always had at least one road trip of eight games or more (and three cities or more) every year since their inaugural season in 1954.
This year the Orioles have already had one eight-game road trip (going 6-2 in a visit to Toronto and Tampa Bay) and have another still to come: a 10-gamer in August through Cleveland, Toronto, and Tampa Bay.
Last season’s road schedule was even more grueling. The 2023 Orioles slogged through two nine-game road trips and a 10-game trip, each of them a three-city tour. Of course, being an awesome team, they went 19-9 on those trips.
Heck, plenty of past Orioles teams have had four-city road trips of 12 games or longer. And back in the 1950s and ’60s, it wasn’t uncommon to have road trips of five or more cities lasting in excess of 16 games. Both the 1954 and 1957 Orioles had 22-game road trips that went through seven cities in one fell swoop, back when teams were traveling by train.
Obviously, air travel has put the days of epically long road trips to bed. But even still, it’s unprecedented for the Orioles not to play more than seven games in any road trip all season. They’ll never be away from Camden Yards for long. And they have two homestands (a nine-gamer in April and eight-gamer in August) that are longer than their longest road trip.
What’s more, the Orioles will be the only team in MLB next season not to have any three-city road trips. (Yes, I took the time to look up the other 29 teams’ schedules.) It kind of makes me wonder if they’ll be the first team in MLB history not to have any three-city road trips for an entire season. That, I’m not willing to take the time to look up.
2. The Orioles’ off days are much more evenly spaced.
Both this season and last, the O’s have had to grind through multiple stretches of the schedule with very few off days. Last year, the Orioles played 23 games in 24 days in one span from July to August, then endured 17 games in a row in September as they tried to close out the AL East pennant.
This year the Orioles faced a similar challenge. Last month, the O’s had another stretch of 17 straight games, part of an exhausting gauntlet of 30 games in 31 days with only one off day in June. And while the Birds navigated successfully through that tempest, you have to wonder if fatigue was setting in when their offense went silent in last week’s 1-5 homestand.
In 2025, the Orioles will finally get some relief. Their schedule includes at least three off days in every month of the season, meaning they won’t face any stretches as brutal as the ones in 2023 and 2024. Their longest cluster of games is 16 in a row, which happens twice, but at least they don’t have to travel far. One of those 16-game spans is entirely on the east coast, and the other doesn’t go further west than Milwaukee.
3. Ohtani and other NL stars will make their biannual visits to Baltimore.
Next year will be the third under the new balanced-schedule format, in which every team plays against all 29 other teams during the season. So the Orioles won’t be playing any opponents we haven’t seen before. Still, they alternate which National League teams they’ll be hosting in Baltimore. All the NL opponents that the O’s played on the road this season, they’ll play at home next year (and vice versa).
That means 2025 will be Shohei Ohtani’s first visit to Camden Yards as a member of the Dodgers. (He did, of course, play at the ballpark several times when he was with the Angels.) That series will take place Sept. 5-7. Baltimore fans will also get their first look at Pirates sensation Paul Skenes, the rookie ace turned All-Star Game starter. The O’s host Pittsburgh next Sept. 9-11, though it might not be a bad thing for the Orioles if Skenes isn’t scheduled to start in that series. And the Reds and their do-it-all dynamo Elly De La Cruz will visit Oriole Park from April 18-20.
Also, the Rockies and Marlins will visit. Those teams definitely have, uh, players. Who I have definitely heard of. They’ve got uniforms and everything.
4. The Orioles will play their earliest Opening Day ever.
The 2025 regular season is set to begin March 27 in Toronto, marking the earliest calendar date for Opening Day in O’s history. Their previous earliest opener was March 28, 2019, when they began the Brandon Hyde/Mike Elias era with a 7-2 loss at Yankee Stadium.
The O’s were originally scheduled to play a March 26 opener for the 2020 season, but then Covid-19 came along and, well, you know the rest.
So for fans who can’t stand the interminable wait for the start of the baseball season, good news. That wait will be the shortest it’s ever been.