We can go as granular as you’d like on the Orioles’ resolutions for the coming year — more money spent, fewer elbow injuries, better outcomes with runners in scoring position — and they’d all be valid.

The Orioles just need to be better at being good.

Overly simple? Perhaps. But think about it. The Orioles are good now in large part because of all the things they did when they were bad. They nailed their top picks (and quite a few beyond them), built a player development machine that’s among the best in the league, made some productive trades of veterans, and hoarded talent on the waiver wire.

The fruits of that mean the Orioles have been good for the last two years and probably will be for a while. That reality, combined with last spring’s sale of the team to a wealthy group led by David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti, means the Orioles have the opportunity to surpass the smaller-market teams they tried to emulate with their rebuild and start competing with the game’s lavish-spending best.

Many of those clubs either already do or are attempting to do the things the Orioles do well — scout and develop homegrown talent — but supplement what they produce on their own through trades of those prospects and by signing the best free agents every winter. They don’t seek to develop from within because they feel like it is the only option for finding great players. They do it because it’s another way for them to build a championship roster, with the added bonus of cost control on younger players that allows them to spend more elsewhere.

So, as the Orioles look to unseat some of these teams and win in October, they’ll need operate more like the teams that shine in October do. We saw some glimpses of it in 2024, with mixed results. Even those who are going to ache watching Joey Ortiz and DL Hall play out this decade in Milwaukee will acknowledge trading them for Corbin Burnes was worth it for what Burnes brought to the Orioles last year.

He was exactly what the 2024 Orioles needed, and that’s even if you believe he was acquired to pitch alongside Kyle Bradish at the top of the Orioles’ rotation and not as a result of his elbow soreness before the season. He came at a steep cost but was worth that price and his $15.6 million salary for his durability and dominance for much of the season in a rotation that didn’t have anyone else to count on as a constant.

Now, however, he’s gone — signed by Arizona to a deal that may have included a hometown discount but still puts him in a salary range ($35 million per year) that only a handful of pitchers have ever earned. All of the other top free-agent pitchers signed elsewhere, too, with teams trying to win championships.

We saw the Orioles again make a one-year commitment to a very different kind of starter — decorated Japanese veteran Tomoyuki Sugano for $13 million, which demonstrated their ongoing willingness to pay players for their much more predictable near-term performance than extend for years beyond that. That severely limits the free agent pitching pool, though, and means the only other way to improve the staff from the outside is trades.

Good teams make those too, some more than others, and they do so without much fear of regretting them because they’re secure in the rosters and depth that they have. To be fair, even after the Burnes trade, the Orioles kind of operated like this at the deadline.

The early work of flipping Austin Hays for Seranthony Dominguez and three prospects for Zach Eflin are the good kinds of trades; two quality starting pitching prospects in Seth Johnson and Moises Chace for a reliever (Gregory Soto) is almost always the bad kind of trade. (I don’t, if we’re being honest, have an opinion on the Trevor Rogers trade. Kyle Stowers and Connor Norby would have helped in 2024, but the jury is still out there.)

But the Orioles’ aggression to add at the deadline was the kind of thing that good teams do. They had that part down, but in making a lot of deals there are more opportunities to make bad ones. Big teams take big swings, and those should be on the menu for the Orioles in 2025. So, too, should some larger free-agent splashes. With Sugano and Tyler O’Neill already in the fold and not many more ideal targets on the market, that may wait until November.

All of these things, however, need to happen as the Orioles continue to operate like a good team, not a scrappy one. They need to be aggressive in continuing to acquire top talent, and spend to either keep it here or get it here. Full marks to the Orioles for getting good how they did. It feels very sustainable. Now, it’s time to get good at being good, too.

Free Agent of the Week

Anthony Santander

You might remember me as the guy who wondered whether Anthony Santander should accept the qualifying offer, have another productive year in Baltimore for a nice salary ($21.1 million), then hit free agency again next winter without said qualifying offer suppressing his market. As spring training approaches, the fears that Santander is the type of free agent who gets squeezed are being realized. I think he’ll still get a nice deal, but I’m worried his slugging profile isn’t as in-demand as those who saw him every day might have expected. It’s kind of sad, and I hope his wait ends soon, as it has for many featured in this space before.

Further reading

2024 wrapped: I don’t know what I’ll remember most about 2024 for the Orioles, but Danielle’s list has a lot of the candidates. I think Anthony Santander’s grand slam against the Astros and Jackson Holliday’s on his return to the majors were awesome moments, and also think Burnes’ domination on both Opening Day and in the playoffs deserve mention.

A father’s last gift: I’d be remiss not to mention the very nice ceremony Monday honoring Andy’s father, a man he wrote about eloquently. I hope everyone who missed it over the holidays doubles back to read it.