The Orioles Are Baseball’s Most Fascinating Team-Building Puzzle

The first baseball cap I remember buying was a gorgeous Orioles throwback. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to it. Maybe it was my mom’s lifelong Orioles fandom. Maybe it had to do with the crisp colors. Maybe I’d just listened to noted ornithological transporter Jay-Z on the drive to West Town Mall. “Before Mitchel and Ness did it/I was moving birds like an Oriole fitted/I’m Cal Ripken Jr., let’s get it” always got me excited to watch some baseball. Whatever the reason was, though, that hat called out to me, so I paid an exorbitant price for something I ended up not wearing very frequently.

I’m telling you this story for a few reasons. First, I want to establish my bona fides as someone who has always had a soft spot for the O’s. Second, I get to show my age a bit — I was in high school when The Blueprint 2 came out. Third, who doesn’t like telling stories? But the main reason is that ledes are hard to write, and I want to talk about the O’s today. To quote Jay-Z: Let’s get it.

A recent Ken Rosenthal article had me double-checking payroll lists and salary tables. The Orioles – the Orioles!! – were listed as the team who increased its payroll by the most from 2024 to 2025. I looked at that for a little bit, looked at the data to confirm that the never-errant Rosenthal had, in fact, not erred, and then I let out a long puzzled sigh. It’s true! The O’s have opened the purse strings this winter. There are a few ways to calculate payroll, but based on the yearly expenditures listed in RosterResource, here are the top five payroll increases across the majors:

A few recent signings have pushed the Dodgers ahead, but Baltimore is right there at the top of the table. Only the Mets and Dodgers have signed more free agents on major league contracts this winter. The O’s have guaranteed four different players $10 million or more per year in free agency, again behind only the Mets and Dodgers. It’s a far cry from last year, when the Orioles signed Craig Kimbrel and then sat out the rest of the process, opting instead to trade for Corbin Burnes. So why doesn’t this offseason feel more triumphant?

Some of the disconnect between the Orioles’ winter of budget increases and the feeling among fans can be attributed to their division and the players they lost to free agency. Coming into 2024, we projected the O’s for 84.2 wins and gave them a 52.8% chance of making the playoffs. This year, we have them down for 82.8 wins and 44.4% playoff odds. Even though our projections are lower on the O’s than other ones, the trajectory is what matters most here. Gambling markets had the O’s over/under at 90.5 wins in 2024; that’s down to 88.5 for this upcoming season. When Dan Szymborski ran his pre-spring training ZiPS projections last week, the Orioles were projected for 89 wins with 68.1% playoff odds, down from 90 wins and 74.9% odds at the same point in 2024. PECOTA thinks Baltimore is roughly one win better than it was last year, so it’s not all bad news, but it’s not quite the bonanza you’d expect from a team that has increased its payroll by a whopping 56%.

One reason: Most of the extra money the O’s are spending is on backfill. Anthony Santander (2024 salary: $11.7 million) departed; enter Tyler O’Neill (2025 salary: $16.5 million) and Ramón Laureano (2025 salary: $4 million). Backup catcher James McCann (2024 Orioles outlay: $4.15 million) is out the door, replaced by Gary Sánchez (2025 salary: $8.5 million). Last season, Burnes made only $15.6 million in salary in his final year of arbitration; both Tomoyuki Sugano and Charlie Morton are in that general ballpark ($13 million and $15 million, respectively). Kimbrel might be gone, but Andrew Kittredge (2025 salary: $10 million) is picking up most of his payroll slack, and hopefully delivering more on the field.

That doesn’t explain all of Baltimore’s increase in cash outlay. The team’s returning players are also earning more in 2025 than they did in 2024. Adley Rutschman qualified for arbitration for the first time this offseason; he’s set to make $5.5 million in 2025, up from $1.05 million in 2024. Zach Eflin, a trade deadline acquisition, is due $18 million in his last year before free agency; the O’s paid him around $5 million last year, with Tampa Bay covering the other $7 million on his contract. Ryan O’Hearn’s salary is jumping from $3.5 million in 2024 and to $8 million in 2025. Cedric Mullins, Dean Kremer, and Ryan Mountcastle each got $2 million raises. Kyle Bradish just hit arbitration for the first time, even though he won’t contribute much in 2025 after undergoing Tommy John surgery last year. The little bits add up.

I want to be clear on one thing: I’m not pointing this out to blame the Orioles. I think their offseason has largely been a success, though I do think they sat out the top end of the starting pitching market as a cost-saving measure. The $28 million they’re combining to pay Sugano and Morton, who both project for ERAs in the mid 4.00s, is a larger average annual value than all but two starters received in free agency this winter, but that amount is for two pitchers instead of one. The bigger deal, from Baltimore’s perspective, is that both of those deals are for one year, giving the team maximum future payroll flexibility at the cost of top-end talent in 2025.

Three of the five Orioles starters were not on their 2024 Opening Day roster, four of six if you count Trevor Rogers, who is expected to miss the start of the season with a right knee subluxation. But even if we exclude Rogers, who was awful after joining the O’s last summer and might not have a starting spot when he returns, Baltimore has reinforced its rotation since the middle of 2024. The problem, though, is this starting staff projects to be worse than it was last year. According to our Depth Charts, the Orioles rank 23rd in projected starting pitching WAR, with 10.1. Last season, Baltimore starters combined for 12.8 WAR, good for eighth in the majors.

So yes, the Orioles probably could’ve done more to improve their pitching staff, but their other moves made a ton of sense. They really did need an extra outfielder; maybe Heston Kjerstad is ready for an everyday role, but it’s hardly a given, and O’Neill gives the lineup more right/left balance even if he ends up as a platoon player by year’s end. Backup catcher is an especially key spot for the Orioles because they give Rutschman plenty of starts at DH to keep his bat in the lineup while allowing him a break behind the dish. For this reason, Baltimore can’t afford to just sign the Tucker Barnharts of the world and hope things work out. A real backup catcher doesn’t always get handed to you from the Mets on a silver platter, as was the case with McCann; sometimes you have to go out and spend a little. Sánchez is an excellent fit for this job, and he is also a capable DH in his own right depending on the matchup.

I’ve been tough on the O’s in recent years for one reason in particular: I thought they weren’t trying hard enough to maximize a roster that had two elite players, Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, making pre-arbitration salaries. That changed when they traded for Burnes last February, but he’s gone now. Meanwhile, the Orioles haven’t won a playoff game with Rutschman, Henderson, and their other young stars, and they’re only getting more expensive. Instead of emerging as a true juggernaut these past two years, the O’s have mostly treaded water.

It’s hard to be better at developing hitters than the O’s. Five of their starters – Rutschman, Henderson, Colton Cowser, Jordan Westburg, and Jackson Holliday – are recent farm system graduates. Rutschman is the only one of them who has reached arbitration eligibility. That group includes, per our projections, Baltimore’s four best hitters. (Sorry, Jackson, you’ll have to prove it in the majors before our models make it a clean five-for-five sweep.) Kjerstad and Coby Mayo might join them before long, too. If you’re looking to build a playoff team on a budget, you can’t do much better than this.

But even with that massive tailwind, the O’s are having to meaningfully increase their spending just to keep everything else at a roughly breakeven level. They’re past the easy gains they can get by plugging in young top prospects to a last-place roster. They’re now at the hard part: maintaining and improving an already good team.

Free agents leave. Contributors get older. Pitchers get hurt. These are just facts of life in baseball. Getting a big head start thanks to immaculate drafting and development is just that – a head start. It’s not the end of the race. Baltimore has added payroll just to maintain its talent; so far, though, this team hasn’t done much improving.

Why? For one thing, baseball doesn’t exist in stasis. When Rutschman debuted in 2022, the AL East was in transition. The Red Sox went from second place to fifth and the Rays regressed to 86 wins after winning 100 games in ’21. When Henderson joined Rutschman in 2023, the AL East turnover accelerated. Boston remained a last-place team, but the Yankees went from first to fourth. Tampa Bay rebounded to 99 wins and a second-place finish. The Blue Jays secured a Wild Card berth for the second year in a row, but their own strong young core was getting more expensive. That was the Orioles’ moment to ascend, and they did, winning 101 games and taking the division. And even though they were swept out of the postseason, it seemed like they would only keep rising from there, if not in the regular season then in the playoffs.

But the rest of the division didn’t pack it up and quit after that. Last offseason, the Yankees responded to their down year by trading for Juan Soto, and then won the division and reached the World Series. The Red Sox improved to .500 and finished third, and during their hibernation at the major league level, they restocked their farm system. The Rays hit a huge bump in the road – the less said about that, the better — and the Blue Jays had a Murphy’s Law season. The Orioles were still good, but they regressed to 91 wins and lost both of their playoff games for their second early-round elimination in as many years.

Now, the division is once again on the rise. After losing Soto to the Mets this offseason, the Yankees embarked on a trading and spending spree. The Red Sox continued their build up and added to that momentum by working the trade and free agent markets aggressively. The Jays both added payroll and traded for a cost-controlled contributor in Andrés Giménez. The Rays are still the Rays; you just know they’ll be buzzing around the periphery of the playoff race.

None of this means that the O’s won’t make the playoffs for the third straight season. Even our comparatively bearish playoff odds think they’ve got a legitimate chance, and given their still-strong farm system and near-majors-ready options, they look like a good bet to improve during the year by trade or promotion. But their rivals will try to get better too. The AL East isn’t quite a five-team free-for-all, but it’s not far from that, and that’s even with the O’s deploying resources that they’d previously held in reserve.

Another tough reality of the sport: Roster-construction windows don’t last forever. Following a franchise-altering few years, the O’s are enjoying the fruits of their focus on drafting and developing, but at some point they’ll need to replenish their produce supply. Rutschman and Henderson are going to be stars for a long time, but they’re not going to be cheap stars for much longer. The natural shape of contending with a youth movement is to start with a relatively low payroll, then see it increase incrementally as those players near free agency or sign extensions. Two years ago, increased payroll was all about bringing new players to Baltimore. Now, it’s also about paying the existing players more.

So once more, I’m writing about the Orioles from a long-term roster strategy standpoint. And once more, I think they have a tough and interesting road ahead. This team is incredible, there’s no denying that. The rebuild? It unquestionably worked. But that just means more interesting decisions in the months and years to come, more chances to trade for pitchers of Burnes’ caliber or sign a capstone piece in free agency.

Two years ago, the O’s were a shooting star, and the interesting question was how bright they’d shine. Last year, when the question was whether they’d go outside the organization to bolster their roster, they rose to the occasion and traded for Burnes. This year, it’s all about sustaining the momentum while also taking that next step from regular season success to postseason wins.

I would say I don’t envy the O’s front office for the challenge it is facing — only I absolutely do. I used to daydream about how I’d run a baseball team while I worked at an unrelated job. Now I daydream about how I’d run a baseball team while writing about baseball. And right now, the Orioles present the most exciting team-building puzzle in baseball. They’re good enough that there are no easy gains for them to make. It’s a great spot to be in, and an undeniably difficult one too.