It’s not worth waiting a few days until I’m grabbing a coffee at the office or sitting around the hockey rink enjoying a postgame refreshment to find out whether the question will come. I already know it will.

It came after the Orioles fortified their lineup against lefties with outfielder Tyler O’Neill and Gary Sánchez, and after they took a fascinating but risky flier on decorated Japanese right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano, and surely will even now that they’ve added veteran right-hander Charlie Morton on a one-year, $15 million deal to further raise their rotation’s floor.

“When are the Orioles going to do something?” was the question then, and I don’t think it will cease to be the question now. So there’s no better time to work out the answer.

It goes without saying that they have done plenty of somethings. That’s probably how my response will start. It’s $63 million in guaranteed money worth of somethings on their 2025 payroll.

For those keeping track, that puts the Orioles 15th — right in the middle of MLB — in projected payroll at $148 million for the coming season, and that’s not without meaning. They could always spend more, yes, but to me and many others I know, reaching that level felt like it was going to represent an acceptable increase over last year’s $103 million.

That they’ve elevated their payroll to this level with almost exclusively young league-minimum players, arbitration-eligible players and pending free agents (sans O’Neill, who can opt out after 2025 or remain in Baltimore for two more years worth $33 million) is an impressive feat.

They have the potential to change course next winter and spend more, have all kinds of areas they can deal major league talent from in season and aren’t so locked into any one or two contracts that they can’t deliver a homegrown star (or three) a massive extension or otherwise add a big-salary player to the roster.

To this point, they haven’t done that, which is why the questions will I’m sure persist about when they’re going to do something. That perspective is, understandably, likely to belong to someone who thinks the Orioles were meaningfully deficient last year as opposed to unlucky or simply a victim of bad timing.

We have a few months’ worth of evidence that they are in the second camp at this point. They’ve maintained there may be tweaks to in-game approach but still refreshed their hitting staff with several homegrown coaches who believe in doing damage with hard contact by making good swing decisions, same as the last group.

They were poor with runners in scoring position in the second half of last year but know the 2023 team was among the league’s best in such circumstances and that such things are unpredictable. They were left thin in their rotation in the first half, then in their lineup in the second half, and in the process they lost some of the platoon advantages that made them so tough to beat in the preceding year and a half.

Their response to that, as evidenced by this winter’s moves, has been to use the new resources that the ownership group led by David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti is making available to reinforce the roster and reinstate all those strengths.

O’Neill and Sánchez, plus healthy returns for Jordan Westburg, Ryan Mountcastle, Ramón Urías and Jorge Mateo, will make the Orioles a nightmare for any opposing lefty. Righties will not feel much better when the so-called reprieves at the bottom of a lineup with Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman at the top are some combination of Colton Cowser, Heston Kjerstad and Jackson Holliday.

This gives manager Brandon Hyde the ability to execute the situational pinch hitting that he utilized so well when his team was whole in the past few year years. Those moments are going to matter, because even lacking an ace to replace Corbin Burnes, any Orioles rotation you can conjure up with the available pieces is full of pitchers who are going to give you five or six solid innings and thus a chance to win.

Grayson Rodriguez can be more than that, and Zach Eflin certainly was after his July trade. Sugano is a wild card whose two outcomes feel like dominance or disaster, but beyond him, Morton, Dean Kremer, Cade Povich and Albert Suárez all have high floors and are going to keep the Orioles in the games they start.

You can do worse than Trevor Rogers and Chayce McDermott as depth, with the promise of a fresh Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells boosting the group down the stretch.

All those starters are the types to make life easier on a bullpen, which will allow the Orioles to deploy a group that will include Félix Bautista more effectively. And, as good as the 2024 Orioles were in the first half, none of these things rang true in the second half of the year. They lacked options in the lineup, had to make several trades to fix the rotation and bullpen, and stopped fighting back to win close games.

To me, all the somethings the Orioles have done are aimed at getting them back to what they did when they were at their best. Even if their lineup choices and in-game maneuvering could be frustrating, they were executed with the idea of giving them the best chance to win that night’s game. Morton is going to do that on his night to pitch. The group of available hitters will be better each night because of Sánchez and O’Neill. The team deserves the benefit of the doubt on Sugano until we see it in action.

All that adds up to a team that, considering it has lost Burnes and Anthony Santander, may not be better than last year’s group but doesn’t feel like it’s going to be worse. It’s less spinning their wheels to me than it is outfitting the truck with a winch, a snorkel, some planks and anything else that could help get it out of the mud if it ever becomes stuck.

All are pointless to the point of derision up until the moment you need them and don’t have them, at which point they become incredibly important. The Orioles’ efforts to improve, at this stage, seem centered around ensuring they don’t get stuck again.

And yet not much the Orioles have done this offseason gives the appearance of progress, hence the questions as to when they’re going to do something. The answer is that they have plenty of capacity to make the kind of move that finally puts the question to rest. I wouldn’t mind anything that truly makes them better. I just wonder, with what we’ve seen to this point, what they think that move might be.