You’re probably doing it, too.

Pick an avenue — any avenue — for the Orioles to complete their offseason work and roster reimagination, and based on the perception-shattering signing of slugger Pete Alonso for five years and $155 million, the endpoint is one that feels so unfamiliar it’s a little unsettling.

An offseason that since the moment it began felt different for the Orioles has proven to be exactly that, and signing Alonso at once shook the baseball world and smashed through whatever barriers, real or imagined, kept this club from being considered among those willing to make big, win-now bets to augment its homegrown core.

But it’s also different in ways, at least now, that few would have seen. The Orioles acquired their closer in Ryan Helsley — a real need met. Adding Alonso and Taylor Ward’s consistency, durability and slug to their lineup satisfied another. That leaves the most glaring one in the starting rotation.

If they operate with the same motivation, moxie and money in the two months before spring training begins as they have in the two months since the season ended, there are some once-outlandish outcomes for the remainder of the Orioles’ offseason that are a lot more realistic.

It feels a little irresponsible even saying that. At some point, enough will be enough. But the Orioles for a third year in a row have struck while the hot stove season was relatively fresh. Signing Craig Kimbrel or Tyler O’Neill or Gary Sánchez certainly didn’t extinguish the fire in years past, though the flame eventually petered out.

This year, they’re throwing on the kind of logs that suggest this is going to burn — brightly — for a while.

They can add a starter in free agency; the debate between Framber Valdez and Ranger Suárez is an ongoing one internally, and we’ll know where they land because once bidding opens for the top pitchers, the Orioles are undoubtedly going to be involved. Considering the lengths they went to in securing Alonso after Kyle Schwarber spurned them, it’s hard to see them being denied from the starter market altogether.

In the spirit of ruling nothing out, because a lot of the intellectual guardrails around what the Orioles do and why are no longer intact, I’m not closing the door on Kyle Tucker or Cody Bellinger or yet another hitting addition that fits the Orioles’ broad goal of elevating their lineup.

But the lineup additions they have made effectively add another category to their trade arsenal — the young, controllable big leaguer — which combined with the rest of their farm system depth makes the potential for a front-line controllable starting pitching acquisition even more likely.

We know how much the Orioles value their homegrown players, and I doubt that has changed. But there are a lot of players whose futures with the club are murky based on bringing in Ward and Alonso: Coby Mayo, Dylan Beavers and Colton Cowser among them.

Other teams know that, and will try to take advantage of it. That could mean the Orioles just hang on to them all because talent and depth remain important and they’re more valuable to Baltimore than any other team. Or it could mean the Orioles recalibrate their expectations on what they’d be worth in a trade and are more comfortable moving them for pitching help.

The latter would mean they could package a big league hitter, a Tier 1 (Trey Gibson, Luis De Leon, Michael Forret, Esteban Mejia) and a Tier 2 (Nestor German, Boston Bateman, Levi Wells, Juaron Watts-Brown) pitcher, plus a strong hitting prospect for a controllable starting pitcher to elevate the rotation for years. The Orioles didn’t want to do anything like that in past winters, but this one is different, and the circumstances have changed.

I don’t see why they can’t add to the rotation through both avenues. Payroll might push past last year’s opening day total of $164.5 million, and they’ll be less flexible with those big deals on the books. That’s a later problem, if it’s a problem at all.

If this feels overly optimistic, or particularly untethered from the Orioles’ reality, that’s kind of the point. But they’ve pushed a lot of chips in to reinforce their lineup and give it, with some performance recovery from the homegrown core, the chance to be among the game’s best.

Are they really going to follow that up by getting cute with the rotation, an area that tanked their 2025 season and is the most clear and obvious need?

That would undermine most of what they’ve done, both this winter and over this decade. They already spent a year adrift with their homegrown core because the early-season rotation submarined the season. Now they’ve supplemented that group with proven sluggers, and the only sensible way to finish the offseason job is to supplement the rotation in similar fashion — which is to say a bit excessively and maybe even unreasonably.

This line of thinking would have been a recipe for disappointment until this winter. It’s probably still one now, honestly. More and more, though, it feels like the regulators are off the engine. If that carries through their pursuits of a rotation upgrade, it’s going to feel as foreign as the last couple of weeks have.