To win a shade under 60% of your games, as the Orioles have the last two seasons, is the type of sustainable success executive vice president Mike Elias and his team sought to build when they took over nearly six years ago.

It’s the product of deeply held belief in their methods and their models, their data and their development practices, all built to reflect what they believe will yield the best results over the long haul.

There’s no long term in the playoffs, though. Five postseason losses in two series sweeps over these two seasons — the most recent Wednesday’s frustrating 2-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals — have gone a long way toward undermining the belief in all that’s come before.

The rebuild and its principles took them this far. How heavy will the remodel need to be?

That answer will come down to the perspective of the new ownership group led by David Rubenstein — who has referred to Elias as the best general manager in the game — and Elias himself, who will spend October asking himself hard questions about the staff and roster that have yielded two early playoff exits.

We’ve seen in the last year that the amount of prospects traded and salary added to the payroll mean Elias is willing to evolve in step with the team’s competitive circumstances. But years of deliberate organizational alignment, across departments and minor league levels, mean that much is set in stone. Any kind of meaningful changes might be akin to pulling off chunks of the façade when tearing down the vines.

It might need to happen regardless. It’s just going to need to be handled delicately.

Every roster has turnover in the offseason, and this will be no different. Corbin Burnes will be offered the qualifying offer so the Orioles can recoup a draft pick if, or when, he signs a well-deserved free-agent deal elsewhere. He was the only constant in the rotation this year — the ace he was acquired to be — and will leave behind a group that for the first time in years won’t be anyone’s first priority in the winter.

They can probably use a bit more help, even if Zach Eflin will be back with a healthy Grayson Rodriguez rejoining Dean Kremer, Albert Suárez and Cade Povich. Kyle Bradish will be back at some point, but with Burnes likely gone, there’s an opportunity to reinforce that group. Same goes for the bullpen, though Félix Bautista returning may be worth more than any offseason addition.

Anthony Santander might be in the same boat as Burnes — a pending free agent and qualifying offer recipient — with James McCann the only other free agent. Ryan O’Hearn and Danny Coulombe have club options, and countless others are due arbitration raises. Many are good players, some better than that. All will come under review.

The Orioles will be forecasting larger roles for Heston Kjerstad, Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo at some point next year, joining homegrown stars in Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson and Colton Cowser. So, even with expected departures, just how much do they shuffle the deck? Do they add an everyday veteran hitter or two who can fortify a lineup that often folded in big spots down the stretch?

Those big spots, as we know, defined the Orioles’ season — all those moments when they could have pushed runners across and didn’t, all the wasted chances, especially those in the playoffs. Against that backdrop, the broader reality is that only Rutschman (by way of his second-half collapse) truly underperformed this year among the team’s core lineup pieces.

If that’s judged to be a structural issue with how they’re coached and instructed, it would be an indictment on the way the Orioles have coached and instructed hitting at every level of the organization for this entire decade. Ryan Fuller, Ryan Borgschulte and Cody Asche all had parts in forming and codifying what the Orioles have their hitters do in the minors and majors.

There are a lot of benefits to that, from consistency of message to the efficacy of the plan itself. The Orioles were a top-five offense this year. If the five games that occurred the last two Octobers outweigh that — and there’s an argument that they could, considering their import — it’ll be challenging to change the voices without changing the message or undermining the conviction in it.

They’ve done it before, though. The pitching side went through something similar last year when pitching coach Chris Holt was replaced by Drew French — a former Astros colleague of his — with Mitch Plassmeyer elevated from the minors as his assistant.

After that, a pitching staff in constant turmoil due to injuries managed to replicate last year’s overall stats almost perfectly. The 2023 Orioles had a 3.91 ERA, the 2024 staff a 3.94. Underlying data was nearly identical as well. That has to be considered a success factoring in the composition of the staff by the end.

It all speaks to how deeply rooted the infrastructure is on the hitting and pitching sides of this organization, top to bottom. Tweaks to those are possible, and the growth mindset that runs through the Orioles’ front office won’t let things stay stagnant if they are.

Somewhere between the pitching and hitting sides, pulling the day-to-day strings where the Orioles are concerned, is manager Brandon Hyde. He is not the reason the season is over. In fact, some of the players have credited him with keeping it afloat as it looked like things were sinking.

He also deserved every bit of praise that came his way for his consistency in the rebuilding years and for his success steering this team to the playoffs in back-to-back years. That doesn’t make him immune to the conversation of changing the messenger but not necessarily the message.

Fair or unfair, there’s no safe havens in situations like these. If last year’s playoff sweep simply stung because it felt so unexpected, this year’s is made worse by the knowledge that it could happen and the Orioles collectively were unable to stop it.

That means everything should be on the table in hopes of preventing it from happening a third time. Perhaps it’s as simple as Rubenstein & Co. giving Elias tens of millions of dollars to make the necessary additions and fill in the gaps between the franchise cornerstones he’s drafted and developed, taking weight off them in the process.

But don’t close the door on the reality where it’s business as usual. By many forecasts and models, internally and externally, the Orioles basically did what they were expected to: not keep pace with the Yankees but make the playoffs, where anything can happen. They couldn’t, they did, and, well, we know what happened this week. Against the backdrop of injuries, there’s a world where the Orioles simply stay the course and don’t make meaningful changes to their roster or staff based on these small playoff samples they know are the most random in sports.

There’s also a world where it’s much more complicated, painful even. Painful self-evaluations for the Orioles’ brass about the staff and processes they put in place, the players they’ve put their faith in, and maybe even the realization that the way they decided to rebuild this team has a ceiling on it that we’ve now seen in back-to-back Octobers.

Those would lead to potentially painful decisions. This was a rebuild full of them, you’ll remember. If we’re talking about a heavy remodel, more are imminent.