When Orioles manager Craig Albernaz and slugger Pete Alonso were asked at last week’s Birdland Caravan introductory event which figures in club history they admired most, neither had to think hard before arriving at Cal Ripken Jr. Before he was a minority owner of the team and, by virtue of that, one of their bosses, he was baseball’s Iron Man, playing a record 2,632 consecutive games.

Alonso, with 162 games played the last two seasons and no more than 10 games missed in any of his seven big league campaigns, feels he’s as close to that as anyone can get these days.

And that makes him a rare example for a team that can fairly attribute most of last year’s underperformance to injuries — both the kind that keep players off the field for weeks, if not months, and the kind they keep to themselves and play through.

It’s easy to understand the broken bones and muscle strains that land players on the injured list. What’s harder to quantify is the impact of the injuries they play through and what kind of weight they are on the club’s performance.

That’s part of what makes forecasting the 2026 Orioles challenging. Every retrospective health update creates a question about the injury’s role in a player’s season. At times they completely explain what held the player back.

But, coming off a season in which so many assumptions were challenged regarding the team’s homegrown core, it feels risky to simply chalk up last year to health and move on — even if that’s probably the thing to do.

Gunnar Henderson’s shoulder issue, which he disclosed on the club’s offseason radio show and elaborated on Friday, is just the latest example. A dive in the field in spring training led to a rib issue that delayed his season, and it clearly took him a bit to get going against the club’s lefty-heavy opponent slate in April. At some point, he dove again and suffered a shoulder impingement with inflammation.

Henderson said he “couldn’t plane out as early as I wanted to, and just kind of chopped down on the ball,” which led to lower power numbers than he’d previously enjoyed; he hit 17 home runs — 20 fewer than the year before — and slugged a career-low .438. He hit the ball hard but couldn’t get to a position to elevate the ball and generate extra-base hits.

The lack of power was notable all year, and the reason is only evident now. On a team with so many players on the injured list at one point or another, it makes sense that Henderson played through what he could. He’s not the only one.

Jackson Holliday had an MRI in September for a knee issue that had persisted for a while, by all indications. Colton Cowser, who broke a bone in his hand during the first series of the season and missed two months, played through fractured ribs after returning.

Jordan Westburg homered three times in the first three games of the season, sat the fourth after the turf in Toronto took its toll on him, and scuffled through April with an upper-body injury before going on the injured list with a hamstring injury.

Add in the October revelation that Adley Rutschman, too, wasn’t just dealing with the pair of oblique injuries that put him on the injured list but back and hand issues dating to 2024, and you have all kinds of explanations as to why this formidable group of homegrown players wasn’t at its best.

I don’t read it as making excuses. That’s not going to be everyone’s take. I think back to the annual spring check-ins about what ailed Chris Davis the year before and feel like I can sense the difference here.

It was only four months ago that, when taking stock of all this (before Henderson added himself to the list), I vowed not to overindex the idea that someone wasn’t 100% healthy in the analysis of potential underperformance. This most recent bit of information is worth indexing pretty heavily, which contradicts that.

The difference, it seems, is that I’d have had the same conviction level in Henderson getting back to his best self whether or not I knew something was physically holding him back in 2025.

What’s worth monitoring is how, with a new staff in place, a new example of durability in Alonso and another year working with head athletic trainer Scott Baringer, the idea of grinding through injuries looks this year.

We haven’t even mentioned the manifold Tyler O’Neill injuries, but perhaps, if the team is healthier as a whole, a week or two off for a star player to ensure he’s at his best will be more palatable than it was early in 2025, when the Orioles were just trying to survive.

Albernaz acknowledged that players naturally are motivated by what happened the year before, so he’s sensed a lot of focus on the Orioles “getting back to feeling their best and going out there and playing to the best of their ability.”

He’s emphasized his players showing up to work hard every day, and he hopes they’re thoughtful in doing so when something is physically holding them back.

“We want all of our players to be resilient, but we also want them to be smart,” he said. “I think, where it comes to our players, they know their bodies better than anyone else. We have to rely on their feedback and conversations and, also, we want them obviously to push through if they can play through it, but also if there’s not a detriment, to a long-term injury. We don’t want guys just to play to play, to pound their chest and say look what I played through, you know? We want to make sure we’re doing it smart and have their best interest in mind.”