The Orioles are going to spend money this winter, adding to their payroll and trying to improve a roster that, by virtue of last year’s underperformance, has many more opportunities to improve versus years past.

Why can I say that with such conviction? Because they have done so, pretty meaningfully, over the 18 months since the ownership group led by David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti took over.

“Mike [Elias] has a lot of authority to go out and find the best players we can get.”

Orioles owner David Rubenstein

That’s not the only reason. But entering free agency, a period when president of baseball operations Mike Elias is expected to make progress toward his stated goal of building the Orioles back into an AL East contender, their spending under this ownership group has come into focus. All signs point to an offseason that might excite a fan base that had little reason to be interested in this club in 2025.

“We have the resources to acquire the players that we need to make the team work,” Rubenstein said Tuesday, sitting beside new manager Craig Albernaz and Elias at the skipper’s introduction. “We don’t have particular financial constraints. We have an investor group that’s pretty deep-pocketed, so we’re able to do what we need to do. So we will do that. Mike has a lot of authority to go out and find the best players we can get.”

Absent setting a payroll target, that’s about all you can expect him to say. But this group has absolutely put those deep pockets to use since digging into them to buy the team from the Angelos family early in 2024. There’s no point in questioning that based on what we’ve seen.

The Orioles’ opening day payroll in 2024, around when the sale was approved by MLB owners, was $92.97 million, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts. Over $15 million of that came from Corbin Burnes’ salary, and he was acquired in a trade just days after the sale was announced.

Elias added around $34 million in 2025 salary at the 2024 trade deadline on Zach Eflin, Seranthony Domínguez, Gregory Soto and Trevor Rogers. Then he added around $73 million in 2025 salary on a large group of free agents: Tyler O’Neill, Gary Sánchez, Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano, Andrew Kittredge, Ramón Laureano, Dylan Carlson and Kyle Gibson.

The resulting team, weighed down by injuries and regression from many of the above-listed names, had an opening day payroll of $164.56 million, according to Cot’s, a club record.

It was also a bad team in many ways, so bad in some that the Orioles have a new manager, will have new hitting coaches and by extension perhaps a new offensive philosophy, and have evaluated everything that led to it.

That underwhelming offseason spending is no doubt part of that. In a vacuum, many of the signings made sense and filled a need, but shopping in the tier of free agents who are willing to take a short-term deal often means older ones without much upside. When they regress, they do so hard, as the Orioles found out.

There would be all the cause in the world to question the Orioles if that’s the way this offseason plays out. I think for many reasons it won’t.

One is that it clearly didn’t work last offseason, obviously. Another is that, optically, any offseason that ends with the Orioles’ payroll below the 2025 level will be completely undermined by that fact, even if the team makes the kind of star-level signings it has missed out on in the past.

So it’ll probably take significant salary commitments to get the team from what FanGraphs’ RosterResource projects as a $92 million payroll right now past the 2025 figures.

My understanding is the Orioles had to pivot to last year’s strategy after the big-ticket targets they sought signed elsewhere. This year, there are more of them whom the club can reasonably secure, both starting pitchers and veteran hitters. They can explore the trade route for those but probably will be focused on bolstering their bullpen, if I had to guess.

They also have incentive to push a little past their comfort zone from a valuation standpoint in free agency to get deals done, simply to avoid missing out on the ones to make a difference.

I understand that, based on the evidence we’ve seen this decade, impact free agent signings and the Orioles don’t seem in any way congruent. Even believing as I do that the club has more intrinsic upside on the roster already than it can add this winter, this is an offseason that will be measured solely by impact.

Elias said he wants the team to be perceived by the baseball world as one that can win a division that has sent a team to the World Series in the last two seasons.

You can’t secure that standing in the public consciousness without making splashes.

There will be a time for hand-wringing, but it isn’t now. I appreciate the club getting a lot of its marginal additions out of the way now so that, if the big plans fall through, signing Leody Tavares as the last player on the bench won’t be considered anything beyond that.

There’s no doubt the pressure is on. It’s just not on ownership. It has spent whatever has been asked, as far as we know. Now it comes down to what Elias asks it to spend on.