2 things the Orioles need to see from Jackson Holliday before the end of season

After missing the first two months of the season, Jackson Holliday is back with the Baltimore Orioles. Since returning, he has been in the lineup most days at second base and consistently batted in the bottom third of the order. Holliday missed all of spring training and is returning from an injury that has a reputation for impacting players' performance for a while after they return, so it feels a little harsh to judge him so quickly, but the early returns on his return have not been good. This is Holliday's third season with the Orioles, and if he can't be an above-average hitter or defender this season, then the Orioles will be facing a difficult decision when it's time to build their 2027 roster.

Holliday is a difficult player to evaluate. Looking at his body of work, you can see his impressive minor league stats that made him the consensus top prospect in baseball; you can see his disastrous 2024 season, his extremely OK 2025 season, and now this season, which so far has not been great. The deeper into Holliday's career he gets without a real MLB breakout, the harder it is to argue that he should be treated like a valuable member of the Orioles' core going forward. However, there is still an argument for Holliday that is worth examining.

Jackson Holliday has been disapointing but he's still far more advanced than most players his age

The big thing that Holliday has going for him is that he is young. That may sound like a cop-out, but it's a fact. At 22 years old, Holliday is younger than the Orioles' current #2 prospect and recent addition to the MLB top 100 prospect list, Ike Irish. Irish is currently in High-A, slashing .265/.384/.462, really nice numbers for a former first-round pick in his first pro season. Holliday hit .314/.452/.488 in High-A as a 19-year-old in 2023. If Holliday had been drafted in 2025 and right now was putting up the numbers he did at High-A three years ago, he'd probably be considered a top-10 prospect in baseball.

Holliday was and is an incredibly advanced player for his age. Most 22-year-old baseball players are not in the major leagues; there are currently only 12 players younger than Holliday in the big leagues. The fact that this is Holliday's third season can make it feel like he's been around forever and he's falling behind, but in reality he's still ahead of most of his peers by age.

The fact that he's young does not completely excuse Holliday's struggles. When he was called up as the number one prospect, the narrative was not: this guy is going to need a few years to acclimate; the narrative was that he was going to be an immediate impact player, and that's not what happened. The purpose of acknowledging that Holliday is young is not to let him off the hook but rather to put into perspective that at his age, significant developmental strides can still be made. Nobody thinks that a 22-year-old in High-A is a finished product; why should Holliday be treated like a finished product just becuase he advanced through the minors so quickly?

So what does Holliday need to show/develop over the rest of the season to not have the Orioles write him off? There are two main areas that need to see an improvement, and if, over the course of the 2026 season the Orioles see these skills going in the right direction, they'll be able to feel confident in having Holliday be a part of the 2027 plans, and if they don't, they should consider trading him or at the very least throttle back his role/playing time.

The first area is that there needs to be an improvement when it comes to plate discipline. Coming up through the minors, Holliday was hailed as a 70-grade hit tool guy. As his career has progressed, it looks like that might have been a little bit of an ambitious evaluation. He has a lot more swing and miss to his game than originally thought. Based on what Holliday was able to do in his one full season, it looks like his path to becoming an above-average bat may have to be more through the power department than the batting average department.

If Holliday is going to be more of a power hitter than a contact hitter, that's fine, but there is a minimum OBP threshold that he'll have to reach in order to be a viable bat, and his current career OBP of .298 is not that. What he did last year, putting up an OBP of .314, isn't that either. By the end of the season, it would be nice to see Holliday putting up good OBP numbers regardless of what the rest of the slash line looks like.

The other thing that needs to improve is that he needs to find a way to make his athleticism translate on the base paths and on defense. Holliday runs well, and he's a fluid athlete, but for some reason he shows poor range on defense and has been a negative contributor on the base paths. These are the kinds of peripheral skills that can keep a young player in the league while he figures things out at the plate. Holliday's bat alone will not keep him in the majors; he needs to contribute in the other phases of the game. If Holliday can make his speed show up on defense and on the base paths, that will go a long way to preserving his spot on the 2027 team.

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