Mike Elias has been in charge of the Orioles for seven years, and however unpopular some of his remarks have been — be they about his decisions, his roster moves or his vision for the organization — they’re often an honest account of what’s to come.

The exceptions — the unpleasant “liftoff from here” fallout in 2022 and all the preamble to Grayson Rodriguez’s and Jackson Holliday’s spring training demotions in 2023 and 2024, respectively, come to mind — ultimately were down to the high expectations he and the club set and failed to deliver on.

So you’ll excuse me for needing to read and reread Elias’ comments from this week’s general managers meetings about his high-end winter wish list and his willingness to spend excessively and even give up a first-day draft pick to sign a top free agent.

Elias has never set such a high bar for the Orioles’ offseason plans. From the day after the season ended, when he said he wanted the club to be considered contenders as spring training began, it’s seemed that he was forecasting a splashy offseason.

This goes beyond that, setting up a simple dynamic for the next month or so. If Elias does what he says the team wants to do, we will be in a new era of Orioles baseball.

Fall short of those expectations — and there are many more ways to do that than to achieve the offseason he wants — and the disappointment would make the reaction to last winter’s moves look like a street festival.

Setting the standard he has is a risk almost as big as being “willing to dip into the red considerably,” which Elias said the ownership group is willing to do to add payroll — a comment that you really don’t hear from a sports executive in this day and age.

From a sentiment standpoint, there isn’t a lot of goodwill for the Orioles to draw from. The hope of a perennial contender centered around their rebuild-era draft picks may rekindle this coming season, but it went dark for nearly all of 2025, when the club collapsed early and spent the last two-thirds of the season playing out the string.

There are plenty of fans who are still invested, but many feel burned. The idea of Elias teeing up this kind of offseason and not delivering would only compound the disappointment about the last year-plus of Orioles baseball.

Elias has to know this. He’s always been acutely aware of how the myriad unpopular trades and nontenders and underwhelming acquisitions of years past would be perceived, and he never let that dissuade him from doing what he felt was best.

He did that under different circumstances than these, with owners who were trying to rein in costs, and in Elias they found an executive who would shed the team’s veterans for a years-out vision of a homegrown contender, which he delivered.

Now a different ownership group, led by David Rubenstein and Michael Arougheti, is in place. Their significant investment in payroll since buying the team in 2024 hasn’t delivered the returns they were seeking. They aren’t taking their money off the table, and Elias let the world know that — and that he was willing to behave differently than in any of the preceding seven years to put it to good use.

Typically the risk is spending money on top free agents; they are often at the end of their prime and being paid well into their 30s for their production in their 20s. But the risk in saying what Elias did is that simply having money to spend doesn’t guarantee free agents come to Baltimore.

This was the case last winter, when the Orioles engaged with the level of free agents they’re speaking of now and ended up with Tyler O’Neill as their big-ticket signing; other clubs have money too, and many of them are in cities that baseball players find more desirable than this one.

Almost every free-agent signing is paying more than you want; signing free agents here might even have a premium beyond that. But Elias knows that now, and he’s still basically forecasting the Orioles will get close to or beyond last year’s payroll, which was about $68 million higher than where they are now, according to Fangraphs’ RosterResource projection.

He’s doing that, I assume, for several reasons. One is that there are enough starting pitchers who could be in the Kyle Bradish/Trevor Rogers tier that coming up empty-handed, if you’re really trying, feels extremely hard to do. Same with relievers who have successfully closed games and the outfield bat they seek.

They can accomplish what they want with the resources available, both in dollars and prospects. The latter has been true for years, and there’s been an expectation from the outside that they’d do more with those trade chips.

The money to spend is a more recent thing. Although they added a ton of payroll in free agency last year, the expectation — from outside certainly, and I bet from above Elias — was there would be much more bang for that buck.

Now the expectation is coming from the man himself.

Add in Rubenstein’s continued declarations of unrestrained resources, and the stage is set for an Orioles offseason in which only one outcome is satisfactory: expensive, impactful additions, which for this club are unprecedented.

If they fall short, there will be no shrugging off disappointment by blaming anyone for having set expectations too high. Over and over, the Orioles are setting them higher than ever before.