One of the early hallmarks of the Orioles under Mike Elias was expectation-setting that, whether explicitly or implicitly, gave anyone interested in listening a chance to understand the organization’s plans and processes.

That was required at the time because what the Orioles were doing — shedding salary and experienced players, adding to their future talent base by diminishing the current one, and losing at a historic clip — wasn’t going to meet the baseline expectations fans have for the teams they support to put a quality product on the field.

Over time, many simply tuned it and the team out. But with every dilutive move they made, Elias reinforced why the Orioles were doing it, why he felt it had to happen the way it was, and what the end goal was: a team of high-quality, homegrown players who could keep the Orioles in playoff contention on a consistent basis.

That kind of expectation management as we know it ended not long after All-Star closer Jorge Lopez was dealt to Minnesota last season for four young pitchers and Elias said it was “not a probability” his surging Orioles would make the playoffs. The backlash in the clubhouse around that sentiment led to his subsequent “liftoff” comment, and without re-litigating that, it pretty well illustrated the positions of the Orioles and anyone who cares about them.

Without the expectation that they’re going to be purposely bad there’s no real consensus on how good anyone should expect them to be, how good they actually can be, or perhaps most crucially, how good management wants them to be. That’s perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this nascent season as it begins today in Boston.

To break down the potential of the 2023 Orioles is an examination of two questions, the first being whether the offseason moves they made to modestly upgrade their starting rotation, second base and backup catcher spots will move the team’s floor higher. There’s nothing transformative about swapping Kyle Gibson in for Jordan Lyles and adding Cole Irvin to the rotation, and it’s the lowest of bars for James McCann and Adam Frazier to give the Orioles more than Robinson Chirinos and Rougned Odor did in 2022.

These moves mean they expect either the same or better from the group of Anthony Santander, Cedric Mullins, Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle, and anticipate even more from their homegrown young stars.

A full season of Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson will raise the team’s ceiling. It seems the Orioles are still a little blind to what Kyle Stowers and Terrin Vavra can add to their lineup, but at least they’re still on the team. And depending on when Grayson Rodriguez, DL Hall, and Jordan Westburg — all close to being ready to help the major league team, if they aren’t there already — get brought up, their presence can push the Orioles’ upside higher as well.

Elias told reporters Monday that prospect depth and expectations for those players aren’t always captured in projection systems. The most prominent, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecasts and FanGraphs, have the Orioles projected at 75 and 78 wins, respectively. My sense is the Orioles’ internal forecasts are higher than that, but not largely so.

These forecasts are likely the starting point for the front office’s view of the team, and how they acted reflected that. After all, this is a team that won 83 games last year with largely the same roster, and had the roster flexibility — and holes in the roster to fill — in free agency; for one reason or another, though, it wasn’t able to make the splash many expected.

Myriad factors go into that. They believe they are at a financial disadvantage based on their market size relative to peers, and believe that would make any error in free agency or a trade doubly costly because they can’t just spend their way out of a mistake, so all it takes is one team with a higher risk tolerance to outbid them. Likewise, they believe their prospects and player development infrastructure is so good that even the young players whose value seems at its highest now can still be worth more, either to them or to an acquiring team, in July or next winter.

Maybe it’s as simple as — to Elias’ point after the Lopez trade — the front office believing the 2022 team overperformed, so it moved forward as if the Orioles had won only 75 games instead of 83 and didn’t alter either its plans or budget accordingly. Which is to say: Elias and other decisions makers saw last year as an outlier, not truly the beginning of the team’s ascent.

That’s not a satisfying argument, but probably explains the signals they’ve been giving behind the scenes that fans’ expectations for this team seem high.

The players themselves don’t think so. And to his credit, Elias said he still believes this is a team that can push for the playoffs and hopes to be adding at the deadline, not subtracting again. That declaration when he spoke to the media Monday also included the acknowledgement that they play in a challenging division and will be a young team.

None of that changes the fact that expectations are what they are for this team. It’s at once welcome and overdue that the expectation isn’t another noncompetitive season. What makes this stage fascinating, though, is how those expectations manifest themselves.

On one side, there’s the relatively traditional notion that the Orioles’ low payroll meant they could have been aggressive in free agency to build to their playoff goal. There’s plenty of frustration in those spaces over how that didn’t happen, and plenty of cynicism as to why. Those who invested in and bought into the team’s plans to develop their own stars might have had mixed feelings on a large trade package of prospects to land a front-line starting pitcher, but it sure would have satisfied the win-now crowd.

A team that featured even more highly-touted prospects than tomorrow’s roster will is every rebuild-enthusiast’s dream, but even that didn’t happen because Rodriguez and others were sent down, leaving the impression of a missed opportunity there as well.

What we’re left with is a circumstance not unlike the Orioles’ approach to Rodriguez. If the team ends up outperforming the projections and pushing for a playoff spot again, it will happen organically, and perhaps the organization will be better equipped to upgrade the roster once they believe it’s a team worth those investments. If not, it will validate their prudence and reinforce that their own value structure and evaluations are the ones worth trusting.

Either way, being able to ask these questions and have this discussion is far better than expecting nothing on opening day. It has just created a world where no matter what is driving one’s expectations, there are countless ways not to meet them and only one to satisfy them: making the playoffs. The players are embracing those expectations. And perhaps only their success on the field will bring the front office to fully do the same.

jon.meoli@thebaltimorebanner.com