The Orioles’ spring home of Ed Smith Stadium, with its stucco walls, Spanish tile roof and palm trees, has a very traditional Florida feel. A planned addition to the Orioles’ complex beyond the stadium’s walls is going to be as modern as they come.

Once spring training is complete, the Orioles will begin work on a roughly $21 million player development facility adjacent to their current baseball operations center at the Ed Smith Stadium complex in Sarasota, Florida, which will include a hitting lab and pitching lab and work spaces for big leaguers and minor leaguers alike.

The extension, which will be paid for by the club, will also include office space, conference rooms, and locker rooms.

“These resources are going to be huge,” director of player development Anthony Villa said. “The fact that we’re going to have a more upgraded space for player development to take place in, a more climate-controlled space so that any of the Florida rain can’t interfere with practice, and then having a lab as well is going to pretty neat. I think that’s sort of the next frontier that, organizationally, we’ve taken some strides in, predominantly on the pitching front. But we’re excited to explore that on the hitting front and continue refining on the pitching front.”

After hitting and pitching labs were initially pioneered by private trainers, teams have begun to build their own labs outfitted with motion capture technology and other tools to collect and analyze biomechanical data, which they then use to optimize player movements and development.

The 42,500-square-foot facility will be built off the back of the current clubhouse beyond the right-field wall, taking over portions of one of the partial practice fields at the complex.

During spring training, Ed Smith Stadium will remain the domain of the major league team, with the ability for players and staff to utilize the labs and training areas as they see fit. Minor league spring training will still be located across town at the Twin Lakes complex due to space constraints. But the rookie-level Florida Complex League team, which plays at Ed Smith during its season, will be based out of the new space.

“We’ve got a bunch of staff members that do an incredible job of rolling with the punches with weather and spacing, and current facility challenges, so this should take some of the pressure off and afford us a little more updated home to be able to carry out practice,” Villa said.

To that end, the facility will boast four tall, square batting cages, which the club believes allows for better judgment of ball flight than the traditional short and skinny cages. Those hitting areas can be raised to create a full indoor infield space for live at-bats with fielders for when the weather washes out workouts.

The lab space on both the hitting and pitching side will also be useful to have in Florida, given the team typically onboards its new draftees in Sarasota before they head north to an affiliate and the fall instructional camps where international signees typically come stateside for the first time are also there, allowing for baseline biomechanical assessments of both cohorts.

Currently, the team has a pitching lab at a MedStar Health location in Bel Air. It’s utilized by major league and minor league pitchers throughout the year, with prospects from their affiliates periodically brought in for sessions during the season. The club utilizes plenty of technology on the hitting side, but this will represent the first dedicated hitting lab for the Orioles.

“We don’t currently have a lab that’s outfitted for hitting, so this is going to be new waters for us — even the fact that it’s down here in Florida, where both major league and minor league will have access to it during the spring is huge,” Villa said. “And then the fact that the lower levels are going to be operating out of there in the summer and the fall, with fall workouts as well, it’s just a really awesome investment that we appreciate ownership making.”

Villa joined the organization ahead of the 2020 season as part of the first wave of coaches hired by Matt Blood, now the team’s vice president of player development and domestic scouting. He said it’s “the nature of eager coaches and staff members” to talk about upgrades like this, and that he and his peers have been discussing them from the beginning.

“As far as things getting serious, that was a credit to David Rubenstein and the rest of the ownership group,” he said. “But you’re always dreaming of how you can upgrade your house. In my free time, I’ve definitely mocked up some fake plans and all of that — which ended up coming in handy for when it became real and we actually had to start giving some inputs.”