O’s future uncertain, but no need to look back

It’s easy enough to put the Orioles’ abysmal 2018 season into its proper perspective. It was a historically bad end to the brief renaissance that proved it is possible to compete in the big-money American League East in one of Major League Baseball’s smaller markets.

Now, we’re going to find out if it’s possible to do more than that with a new-age general manager and a 21st-century approach to player evaluation and development.

The first step in that direction was taken when John and Louis Angelos ripped the rear-view mirror off their stripped-down franchise and handed the keys to new executive vice president and GM Mike Elias.

There are no guarantees, not after the team that won more regular-season games in the American League than any other over a five-year period tailspinned out of 2017 and lost a Baltimore franchise-record 115 games this past season. That unprecedented collapse left the Orioles with their smallest single-season attendance total in 40 years and — you would think — nowhere to go but up.

Elias and analytics guru Sig Mejdal certainly have the right credentials to oversee the rebuilding effort that started with Dan Duquette’s trade-deadline teardown last July. They come out of a Houston Astros front office that took a new, hightech approach to scouting and under GM Jeff Luhnow needed three years to turn the worst team in the National League into a consistent winner and eventual world champion in the realigned AL West division.

That’s the plan for Baltimore and the fresh faces at the top of the organization should give fans reason to be optimistic that better days are ahead. But the challenge that Elias, Mejdal and new manager Brandon Hyde are undertaking comes with a greater degree of difficulty than the one Luhnow faced in Houston seven years ago.

The AL East will always feature at least two teams with vastly superior resources to the Orioles, which is why Duquette spent so much time culling the waiver wire and shuffling through the castoffs of other organizations. Theoretically, the new analytics-driven Orioles braintrust will have more success threading that needle — especially while drafting very high the next few years — but there still is an element of chance in every acquisition.

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