Jon Meoli: The Orioles’ real lesson from these 2 great league championship series

There used to be a head football coach here who wouldn’t even entertain hypothetical questions. In some ways, I don’t blame him.

In any walk of life, there are enough actual obstacles and circumstances to navigate that using energy on ones that don’t exist is a waste. Seeing baseball’s two league championships serve as a referendum on the different ways to try to win — small-market teams in Cleveland, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee looking for every edge within their means while the Dodgers spend money hand over fist (while trying to find value at the margins, same as the smaller clubs) — has me thinking about the Orioles’ standing in the game and the path they used to be on.

The Orioles don’t fall into either of those buckets neatly. They don’t spend like the Dodgers do and have one of the smaller front offices and analytics groups in the game. But they have money to spend and have used it on Pete Alonso in free agency and contract extensions for Samuel Basallo, Shane Baz and Kyle Bradish.

And they’ve returned to their small-market, future value-focused roots at the last two trade deadlines by adding significant talent to their farm system through trades of major league stars nearing free agency.

Something clearly changed in the Orioles’ approach to constructing their roster when David Rubenstein, Michael Arougheti and their group bought the team from the Angelos family and altered the club’s financial situation.

Seeing all the teams president of baseball operations Mike Elias tried to model the Orioles after competing for places in the World Series begs a simple question: What if that hadn’t happened?

The hypothetical in question isn’t one I have any interest in being a reality, but it’s worth exploring.

The good news is this team’s high-water mark probably wouldn’t have been drastically different. The 2023 Orioles’ magical season occurred under the Angelos family’s stewardship and was a result of the players who survived the rebuild and those drafted and acquired during it coalescing into one of the game’s most complete teams.

The following January, the team’s sale was announced and, within days, Elias traded Joey Ortiz and DL Hall, plus a draft pick, for Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes. (The Orioles of future seasons certainly could have used both of them, even though Burnes was worth it for 2024.)

We’ll never know whether that was spurred by Bradish’s offseason elbow soreness, a newfound freedom for Elias not to view prospects as the only avenue for good players to join the Orioles roster or some combination of the two.

But something clearly changed in that period and persisted into the next season, when the Orioles spent two-plus months as arguably the best team in baseball and then went on a buying spree at the trade deadline to try to steady the ship.

Again, those trades weren’t all worthless. Zach Eflin saved the rotation down the stretch that year, and Trevor Rogers has been the Orioles’ best pitcher the last two seasons. There didn’t appear to be a path to Baltimore for some of the higher-profile players sent out, including Kyle Stowers and Connor Norby, even though Stowers turned into an All-Star and Norby has been a useful player ever since.

The next two years are easy to second-guess because of the results — a 2025 face-plant out of the starting blocks that cost Brandon Hyde his job, followed by this year’s team that spent the entire season waiting for things to click.

This isn’t an exercise to do that. But, before the 2021 deadline, Elias cited the “very transactional” nature of the Rays and Guardians, who continually refresh their rosters and trade players nearing the end of club control for prospects and keep that cycle going for multiple iterations of the major league club.

That ended up happening out of circumstance at the next two trade deadlines but doesn’t exactly count as a core tenet of the Orioles’ roster building.

If it did, that would have looked something like trading Cedric Mullins after the 2024 season (with one year left of club control) and having Ramón Laureano be the main outfield addition in free agency, rather than the Tyler O’Neill signing for three years and $49.5 million.

They probably would have signed just one of Tomoyuki Sugano or Charlie Morton and instead been in on one of the down-market reclamation projects for their 2025 rotation that other teams often hit on.

They ended up trading Mullins (and many more) at the deadline that summer, and they did well in all of those trades. But, again, that was a circumstance of how injuries and poor play derailed their season, and there’s a world where they aren’t in a position to make all of the trades they did in 2024 and have Ortiz, Stowers and Norby on hand as depth to prevent that early-season collapse from happening.

Similarly, their 2025 offseason probably goes differently. Alonso wouldn’t be here, and any hypothetical that includes that stipulation is a bad one. But there’s probably no Baz trade, probably no Taylor Ward trade, and instead they’d probably have explored trading Dean Kremer, which they ended up doing during the season anyway. Same goes for Ryan Mountcastle.

The most important part of this would be that the Adley Rutschman trade wouldn’t have been such a shocker. If this was how the Orioles kept operating, it would have been a matter of when, not if, something like that happened with a star who wouldn’t sign a contract extension. They’d have conditioned everyone to it, with the same reaction as when Trey Mancini was dealt in 2022. Other beloved players have been traded since then, but only when the team’s circumstances dictated it.

For teams who don’t want to pay top-end arbitration salaries or let players hit free agency, this is often the reality. That’s not the Orioles’ reality anymore, and it’s a good thing. Instead of entertaining trade offers for Bradish this winter, they extended him. Instead of everyone expecting this to be the winter Gunnar Henderson is dealt for maximum value, the expectation is he’ll be back in Baltimore trying to regain his All-Star form in 2027.

All that is good. It’s not as if the Orioles are terribly popular right now, but that approach of constantly cycling through players can grate on a fanbase, even if there’s more consistent playoff baseball because of it.

The challenge they face now is to thread the needle and take lessons from both sides — the scrappy teams they used to emulate and the Dodgers, who spend money extremely well. All of them have robust analytics departments that uncover value and inform decisions that largely pay off on the field. All of them are lousy with players their farm systems produced, be they drafted or acquired in trades.

And all of them have a very clear understanding of what they are, where their edge is and what advantages they have that they can push to stay ahead of the pack.

The Orioles do a lot of things well still, though recent evidence suggests there’s plenty of room for improvement. I don’t watch these postseason games as a referendum on the right way to build a team. I’m watching them and thinking the Orioles need to decide how they want to operate, and what they want to be great at, then get to it. Fast.