No longer among the league’s lowest or a cause for embarrassment any time it is seen listed as such, the Orioles’ payroll has been less of a topic of conversation this winter than in years past — locally, at least.

In Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is being held, the Orioles’ payroll has come up, which puts it on a level of great global import as owner David Rubenstein talked spending on the team he’s owned for nearly a year.

Rubenstein told Yahoo Finance, “The team is in pretty good shape,” noting its free-agent additions and departures, while pointing out that payroll is “higher than when we took over the team.”

“And so,” he said, “we have a payroll that we think is consistent with our needs and so forth. I don’t think anybody is not playing for the Orioles because of money reasons.”

It feels to me, even as we’re a few weeks from spring training, as if we can start to have conversations about the Orioles’ offseason as a completed exercise. I believe there’s still room for one large move if the right one presents itself, but I am not sure what that would be. That means the moves they have made — adding Tyler O’Neill, Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano, Andrew Kittredge and Gary Sánchez in free agency — plus the spate of arbitration raises they’ve given out, have brought the Orioles’ payroll from last year’s opening day figure of around $93 million to a projected $156 million, according to RosterResource.

This is a team whose payroll over the last decade has been at the extremes. It peaked in 2017 at $164.3 million on opening day, which ranked in the top third of the league, as the club spent at what the prior ownership group would later claim was beyond its means to keep a contending core together. We know how that went. The resulting regime change, which brought in general manager Mike Elias and company, came with significantly lower major league payroll as the club rebuilt.

The opening day payrolls from 2019-23 didn’t rank higher than 27th in MLB, yet the team’s fortunes turned in 2023 on the field and the following winter off of it when Rubenstein, Michael Arougheti and their group bought the club from the Angelos family.

They added salary throughout 2024, with the trade for Corbin Burnes and with a series of trade deadline acquisitions, all of which had the dual impact of depleting the high-end depth in their farm system. That was the kind of investment in winning that people wanted to see in the moment, though mileage may vary on whether those moves went far enough. They couldn’t spend money in season but they did what they could, and they have spent since it ended.

Committing $62 million for 2025 to five free agents, to say nothing of the nearly $34 million in 2025 salary they added to their books at last year’s deadline, is objectively a lot of money. It has also not really come in the form of any one big move, not like we see the Dodgers making seemingly every day, or that the Mets and Yankees have defined their offseasons by.

So in classic Orioles form, even doing the thing everyone is banging on about them doing is fraught. If they’d added $62 million to their payroll and half of it was to Corbin Burnes or a Corbin Burnes-like player, this winter would be considered a smashing success for the Orioles. Depending on what the rest of the moves were, they’d also probably be in a similar position to last year when they had to spend prospect capital to fill holes.

That they’ve spent on near-term help and clearly done so with the idea of not damaging their competitive chances down the line — be that by tying up salary on free agents who command a long-term deal or leaving themselves in a position to need to trade a boatload of prospects again in July — means they’re using their money in a way that still feels very true to how Elias has operated here.

It also opens them up to criticism that they’re basically spending money to say they did and not actually demonstrating the commitment that those who wanted the team to spend more sought.

Here’s the reality: As Rubenstein noted, there’s no hard salary cap (though his comments on the eventuality of one were intriguing, to say the least). That means teams can spend what they see fit.

The Dodgers are spending a ton more than anyone else, and the Mets gave Juan Soto a massive contract because they could. Using free-agent cash, even a lot of it, to reinforce the floor of a promising club that hasn’t won a playoff game yet is not the same as adding big-name players to build the club around for the rest of the decade.

By spending enough to end up right in the middle of the league in terms of projected payroll, the Orioles quite literally find themselves in the middle of the discourse that has defined this rebuild both as it was going on and now that it’s finished. On the one side, there are those who recognize what they’ve done as natural progress. If anything, this year’s payroll sets a floor for this ownership group, which means something. And then there are those who will always bang the drum for more.

By the raw numbers, it feels like asking a lot, though it’s not as if this ownership group is devoid of cash or that the leaguewide revenue streams are drying up. Of course they could spend more.

They’ve also pretty inarguably spent a lot. They’re paying players acquired in trades and free agency since Rubenstein’s group entered the picture a combined $96 million. The question that will define the Orioles’ season isn’t going to be whether they spent enough, but did they spend it well?