The hints came as frequently as the sweet interjections from new Orioles manager Craig Albernaz’s two-year-old daughter, Gigi, and at a certain point became hard to ignore.

Nearly everything Albernaz said while being introduced to Baltimore Tuesday, along with the praise that came his way from president of baseball operations Mike Elias and owner David Rubenstein, suggest this was a hire made with one thing in mind: to get the most out of what the Orioles have spent years building, both on and off the field.

He’s here to fix and elevate the young core. That’s his mandate.

Yes, Rubenstein alluded to new players helping the Orioles climb from last place and reiterated that the ownership and team “don’t have particular constraints” to adding expensive players this winter. Elias said the front office’s list of offseason tasks is long. We can expect this roster to be upgraded wherever they can.

None of that will mean anything if the homegrown group this team is built on — starting with Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday and so many more — isn’t thriving, improving and in many ways carrying this team. The homegrown core reaching its potential will do more for the Orioles than even the most pie-in-the-sky version of their hot stove activities.

Elevating this group will by extension validate the front office that drafted and developed them, and because we have already seen what this looks like at its best, it’s fair to assume the priority for the manager here is to make that happen.

“We feel like he’s ready to hit the ground running,” Elias said. “We feel like we have a team that has a really good shot to bounce back next year and be a team that can make the playoffs, but also hopefully can make a deep playoff run, in pursuit of a World Series. I think, and our department thinks, that Craig is the right leader for the next phase of this team and its maturation, but also for the 2026 season and beyond.”

Often, Albernaz gave the impression that his operation was going to be built around the players rather than him. He spoke frequently about listening to them and their needs, and is early in the process of hearing that. He appeased his young sons by saying he’s spoken to “six or seven” players so far (and if you’re not a teenager, you may not get the joke here). He said a few times he plans to double down on the strengths, and that the way the Orioles play will reflect what his players are good at.

He sprinkled in some wisdom into how he relates to them, too. Albernaz said he plans to be himself, and gave the impression of a charming and disarming person who understood how players work.

“Players just want to be coached,” he said. “That’s what I’ve learned. Players just want to get better. The reason why guys play 10 years in the big leagues is because they continue to get better. Players just want to know that you have their right interests in mind, and they’re competitors. No ulterior motives. All players want to make as much money as they can, and they want coaches in their corner, people in their corner, that can help them do that. And also, that helps the team win a lot of games. Players see through when you’re being fake, so you have to be a truth teller and be authentic to yourself. That’s something I’ve prided myself on ever since I first got into coaching.”

Elias noted that at all of Albernaz’s previous stops — first in player development for the savvy Tampa Bay Rays, then on the progressive major league staffs in San Francisco and Cleveland — gave him both a depth of knowledge and experience to draw on as well as an understanding of how to navigate a new organization.

To do so here is to operate within an organization that has been shown incredible conviction in its processes and the players those processes have identified and helped develop — and almost all of that is data-driven.

Albernaz used a phrase that the Orioles have used around the draft to describe how he works with analytics, saying he’s “trying to place good bets on the field,” and “those numbers and datapoints help you place those bets.” That’s why the Orioles have done so much of what they have this decade — because the probabilities of, say, drafting high-performing college hitters or training hitters to hit the ball hard in the air, have the highest likelihood of success.

That Elias, with top lieutenant Sig Mejdal and the staff they’ve built, chose a man who welcomes analytics into his process is hardly notable. There’s no quarter for Luddites here. But where Albernaz can make a difference is, again, application with the players. Mejdal, remember, spent a season in uniform as a minor league coach as a member of the Astros’ front office to see how data and technology was actually used.

So it would have been music to their ears to hear Albernaz speak of giving players “the right information at the right time, and making it digestible, but also listening to the players’ feedback.”

None of this is new. The Orioles’ staff under Brandon Hyde tried to do the same, and it largely worked. That’s why the Orioles won the AL East in 2023 and were the game’s best team for the first few months of 2024, before things started unraveling and never really stopped.

And that’s why Albernaz is here: To set things back in the right direction. Everyone around the game is working with the same information toward the same goals, and application makes the difference. Albernaz’s application will be of the detailed and energetic variety.

He’s so detail-oriented that he and his sons matched Tuesday, right down to their black suits, orange-and-black Air Force 1s, and the print inside their collars. He’s so magnetic that he’s earned loyal admirers at every stop of his baseball journey. He’s so beloved that his close friend and former boss (Guardians manager Stephen Vogt) flew across the country to offer support Tuesday. He even made the close-to-the-vest Elias laugh a few times.

He did so by suggesting that Elias is going to “cook” this offseason, which might warrant a chuckle from other perspectives for an entirely different reason, but that’s almost beside the point. Elias’ specialty, and this organization’s specialty under him, is actually what Albernaz is already inheriting: They draft and develop hitters really, really well.

The last year-plus of Orioles baseball illustrated that they need more to get deep into October. But to save face and justify the approach they took to help the Orioles get as far as they did, they need Albernaz. Success with this group, no matter how Elias adds to it, authenticates everything the Orioles did to get to this point.

Albernaz’s job is to rehabilitate both the players and the front office that has believed so much in them. To some extent, it’s the entirety of his role. He likes what he’s working with — and knows that’s a big part of what he’ll be judged on.

“The talent just jumps right out at you,” he said. “Even playing them this year, it was a down year, a lot of injuries but the talent up and down the roster is impressive, and when you have a group of young players that get to the big leagues and have success like in ’23 and have a rough ’25, it’s really tough to curate that adversity for young players to go through. For them to have it happen on the biggest stage, dealing with the injuries, and I wouldn’t say poor performance, but they can perform better, in their eyes. I can’t wait to see the work they put in the offseason come out next year and really take on that challenge.”