Baltimore Orioles Not Focusing On Hitting More Home Runs in 2024

Despite the push for more power hitting in the game, the Baltimore Orioles aren't focusing on that ahead of the upcoming season.

There's a lot of momentum behind the Baltimore Orioles heading into the 2024 season.

Led by a group of young superstars and very productive veterans, they had an incredible year in 2023 and are already looking to build upon that to achieve greater things.

The 101 wins and AL East division title was dampened a bit by being swept in the playoffs, but for a young team, this was a great sign their rebuilding efforts are finally paying off.

The Orioles scored 807 runs last season. Only six other teams scored more.

These largely didn't come from the long ball either.

Baltimore hit 183 home runs, ranking 17th across all clubs in the MLB.

With the changing of how teams approach the game, there has been more of an emphasis on hitting for power and trying to increase the amount of homers hit throughout the year.

However, the Orioles aren't focusing on that coming into the season.

"I don't know if we are necessarily going to focus on hitting homers. The goal of our offense is to score runs and we did a good job of that last year in where we stacked up ... That's going to continue to be the focus, scoring runs. And however we are able to do that, that is what we will continue to focus on," co-hitting coach Matt Borgschulte told Steve Melewski of MASN.com.

It's hard to argue with that.

It's the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Baltimore certainly didn't have anything that was broken during the regular season in 2023, and making drastic changes to how their hitters approach things at the plate would be an overreaction.

Their other co-hitting coach, Ryan Fuller, also told Melewski that he thinks things will naturally improve as their young hitters gain more experience at the plate.

Scoring as many runs as they did in 2023 without getting a high-percentage of balls over the fence can be seen as a positive.

They can score runs without being home run reliant.

If the power numbers do jump for the Orioles as their players get more reps at the Major League level, that makes them much scarier of a team.