If you’re looking for instant gratification, international scouting for a baseball team probably isn’t for you. Latin American amateurs can’t sign until they’re 16, but the process of scouting them and reaching agreements with the top players in each class begins years before that.

Then there’s a year or two of waiting until the players come stateside as professionals, then several more years for many before they reach the big leagues. And when you don’t participate in the market in any meaningful way, which was the Orioles’ approach for almost all of the 2010s, it takes years to catch up to the rest of the league.

Koby Perez, the Orioles’ vice president of international scouting and operations, knows that better than most. “We plant the seeds; you don’t see anything,” he told me last month.

But the flowers he alluded to — Samuel Basallo’s celebrated ascent to the majors, broader recognition of the players already in affiliated ball — are starting to sprout.

A significant green shoot is coming this week as the Orioles are set to add four position players worth seven-figure signing bonuses — headlined by shortstop Jose Luis Acevedo, along with outfielders Ariel Roque, Pedro Gomez and Gabriel Rosario, according to Baseball America — plus left-hander Andri Hidalgo, one of the top pitchers of this 2026 class. This was the first cycle when Perez felt the team was operating on the same level as its more established peers in the space.

“The reason we have these seven-figure guys that we’re going to sign this year is because we’re signing them in January, but it’s been 2 1/2 years since we made these decisions,” Perez said. “I think two, three years ago, we said, ‘OK, this is the class. This is the pool. These are the best players. Let’s start. Now we have enough history with them. Now we can attack.’ This year really feels good.”

The preceding years featured much different work for Perez, who was hired in January 2019 from the Cleveland Guardians in what president of baseball operations Mike Elias called then “a major first step in improving our footing in Latin America.” Elias and Perez had worked together in St. Louis and were reuniting with an Orioles team that had previously not invested heavily in scouting or signing amateurs from Latin America at the directive of ownership.

Even as Baltimore was starting to make signings in the waning months of Dan Duquette’s time in charge, Perez had to build a staff to begin the process. He inherited Luis Noel, a former pitcher in the organization who was part of the underutilized operation before Elias took over and who Perez said has done well for the organization under the new setup.

Perez had been working in international scouting for over a decade and had plenty of contacts, some of whom ended up getting raises from their clubs to stay after Perez reached out to them. There was no such issue with the first hire, Michael Cruz, who was working for MLB at the time.

Perez had recommended Cruz for a junior college baseball opportunity out of the Dominican Republic. He liked how Cruz came to the U.S., learned English and earned a college degree, which combined with his baseball acumen made him “a kid we needed to have.” Perez paired him with Rafael Belen, a veteran scout who was a supervisor with the Rangers and previously the Astros whose top signings included Teoscar Hernández.

“I felt like we needed a veteran who everyone knew and had signed big leaguers,” Perez said. “He knows what it takes. I thought it was a good combination to bring in the younger guy to learn from the little-bit-older guy.”

Francisco Rosario was the last of the hires in 2019. The former minor league player was hired away from the Seattle Mariners, with whom he had a large role in signing former American League Rookie of the Year Julio Rodríguez.

Gerardo Cabrera joined the Orioles in 2020 from the New York Mets, for whom he signed many of the club’s current homegrown talents, including Ronny Mauricio and Francisco Alvarez. Cabrera, whom Perez said the Orioles were fortunate to add, played at Miami Dade College but was born and lives in the Dominican Republic.

That made for one of the smaller scouting groups in the Dominican Republic, Perez said, but it brought credibility to the team and helped accelerate the process of reentering the region. Elias and Perez visited agents to assuage their concerns about how the Orioles previously operated in the market, and the scouts got to work on future classes. The scouts hit multiple showcases and workouts a day, and scouting assistant Riliani Familia brings a portable TrackMan unit to collect data that informs decisions.

Venezuelan scouts Yfrain Linares, Francisco Veracierto, Christian Casanova and Victor Prato rounded out the staff, with Perez crediting Maria Arellano and Scarlett Blanco for their work on the operational and administrative side to help deals go through.

In those first few years, the top players were already committed to clubs, leaving the Orioles to sign late bloomers or players like Basallo who came back onto the market late. Any effort backfilling the classes for the first few years of this decade meant the team’s focus wasn’t on future classes the way other clubs’ was. Perez said it took four or five years for the team to be in step with the rest of the league’s scouting cadence, which he felt was the case in 2023.

Even so, many of the top players in those classes were already committed.

“This class that we’re signing in January, that’s kind of our first full one: Let’s compare this guy to that guy. Do we want this guy or that guy? We feel great about our class, and we did thorough work on these guys. We’re not signing very many like we have in past years, but we’re hoping that, if we can hit two or three of them, it’s a home run for us.”

This year’s class has nearly as many players signing for a million dollars or more (four) as the Orioles had signed to such bonuses previously (six). Before long, the newcomers will be populating top prospect lists that already feature Basallo, pitchers Luis De León and Esteban Mejia, second baseman Aron Estrada, and outfielders Thomas Sosa and Jordan Sanchez, among others.

Future classes, Perez believes, will benefit from the Orioles’ recent hire of Roman Ocumarez as international cross checker. Ocumarez was most recently the Marlins’ international scouting director after working with the Astros. He helped sign a number of star pitchers, including Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier, to inexpensive deals.

In addition to the dedicated staff in the market, Perez said vice president of domestic scouting Will Robertson and special assistant Danny Haas provide evaluations of top targets. It’s a small group, but Perez said it signals that, when the Orioles are at a workout, their interest is real.

Other teams are recognizing that progress. Perez has long measured that by how they pursue prospects his group signed in trades, as well as how they’ve showed up in droves on prospect lists — which is all the more impressive considering it’s only now that the first seeds they planted as a fully operational group are sprouting.

“I think we have a really good small group, and it’s been hard to keep together, too, because we’ve been signing good players and teams see that,” Perez said.

“We don’t need a huge staff, but we do have people that I trust.”