Dawn of new season marks start of new era
With rebuild in rearview mirror, World Series window is wide-open
The last time Camden Yards hosted opening day, Adam Jones homered, Manny Macahdo doubled and the Orioles won in walk-off fashion.
They would win just 46 more games in that franchise-altering 2018 season. The futility of that ballclub is what sparked the rebuild that’s led to now.
The Orioles open their 2024 season today at Camden Yards with the fruits of their painful rebuild in full effect — and ready to take the next step. Former top prospects Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson are Most Valuable Player candidates. The veterans who survived the teardown are in their prime. Pitcher Corbin Burnes, one of baseball’s best who will start on the mound, was acquired this offseason thanks to the organization’s glut of prospects.
Last year, the plucky Orioles broke out of their rebuild to become playoff contenders but cracked under the bright lights of the postseason. This year, they’re expected to compete for a championship.
The Orioles’ World Series window is wide-open, and under new owner David Rubenstein, 2024 will mark the beginning of a new era of baseball in Baltimore.
“It’s awesome,” catcher Adley Rutschman said of the excitement. “I think everyone believed this could happen. We weren’t just wishing for it, we believed it and we went out last year and did it. We’re here to win, we’re here to compete. With that day-to-day process, we’re going to go as far as we can.”
The hype has only been magnified by one of the craziest offseasons in franchise history — the completion of a long-awaited lease, the sale of the team to a Baltimore native, a trade for a bona fide ace and the death of former owner Peter Angelos. In addition to the whirlwind offseason, Baltimore fans will scream “O” and cheer for the local nine today with heavy hearts after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse Tuesday morning.
The championship window is often shorter for small-market teams, but maybe the club’s frugal spending approach could change, too. The team’s sale to an ownership group led by Rubenstein, a private equity billionaire, was officially approved by Major League Baseball on Wednesday — ending the Angelos family’s 30-season control of the club. The sale, valuing the team at $1.725 billion, was approved in less than two months and includes 17 other members of the ownership group, including Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr., uber-wealthy Mike Bloomberg and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke.
In a video posted on social media Wednesday afternoon, Rubenstein, who said he plans to sit in the stands and mingle with fans during today’s game against the Los Angeles Angels, said he hopes fans will “support the team” throughout the “next chapter of the Baltimore Orioles.”
“Hopefully, that will lead us to another World Series championship in the very near future,” he said.
Angelos’ legacy as Orioles owner is complicated, but it
wasn’t successful with just six playoff appearances and twice as many losing seasons as winning ones. He was praised after buying the team in 1993 for a then-record $173 million for blocking out-of-town buyers, but fan sentiment quickly soured as results on the field declined and his meddling provided undesirable results. The same fan base quickly became frustrated with his elder son, John, after he took over as the club’s control person in 2020 and committed frequent mishaps with the media.
But the organization is in a healthy state for Rubenstein, who now heads one of the best young clubs in baseball coming off a season in which the Orioles shocked the baseball world. They won an American League-best 101 games — the franchise’s most since 1979 — only for the magic to run out in the playoffs. Baltimore went 91 series without being swept from May 2022 through 2023’s regular season and then, ironically, were swept out of the playoffs by the Texas Rangers, who went on to win the World Series.
That sweep left an imprint on the Orioles, but they showed up to the Ed Smith
Stadium complex in Sarasota, Florida, this spring determined not to let it define them.
“I think we showed a couple years ago that the window was coming up, and we took it another step last year,” center fielder Cedric Mullins said. “We know what our end goal is at the end of this.”
While spring training results have little correlation with regular-season success, the Orioles dominated the Grapefruit League with a franchise-record 23 wins — most for an MLB team in spring since 2017.
“It is a new team, a new year,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “But I think that we’re just as talented, and we won a lot of games last year.”
The Orioles won’t be catching anyone by surprise this year. While public projection systems are a bit bearish with win totals between 84 and 90, no one else is. In a poll of nearly 100 MLB.com writers, the consensus has Baltimore beating the star-studded Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
The club — and its energized fan base — also have sky-high expectations they haven’t felt since at least 2015, and perhaps much longer. Attendance at Oriole Park is expected to increase once again after last year’s success. During the rebuild, the Orioles had among the worst attendance in MLB, but Camden Yards had a 41.5% increase in fan turnout last season.
Hap Conover, a 24-yearold Baltimore native, said his excitement is the “highest it’s ever been” and hopes the Orioles can bring home a championship during this window, or as he calls it, “the golden years.”
“I’m so thrilled about the offseason,” said Conover, who attended almost every home game last season. “The Corbin Burnes trade just felt like finally pushing the chips to the center of the table, the type of moment that we as fans have been waiting for to cap this rebuild.
“I’m absolutely thrilled about Rubenstein. There’s a ton of optimism about ownership that is going to care about winning and wants to invest in the team.”
The other teams in the vaunted AL East — viewed as baseball’s toughest division with all five teams projected by FanGraphs to win more than 79 games — are also far past doubting the former cellar-dwellers.
The Orioles are no longer the punching bag of baseball’s best division. They’re the ones delivering blows.
“We’ve seen them building this thing the last several years,” New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone said during spring training. “This is a team that you expect to not only be good this year but for years to come.”
That’s because the Orioles again boast the top-ranked farm system in the sport with five prospects inside Baseball America’s top 50. Jackson Holliday headlines that list as one of the best prospects in recent memory, as the 20-year-old zoomed through the minor leagues in his first full professional season last year in unprecedented fashion. Despite a strong spring, he was controversially left off the Orioles’ opening day roster, as the club aims to get him more experience in Triple-A before he makes his major league debut.
“I’m confident that it will play out as the right thing to do,” Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said.
Despite the talent on the farm, the time to chase a title is now, and that’s why this offseason Elias acquired Burnes, the 2021 NL Cy Young Award winner with the Milwaukee Brewers, to headline Baltimore’s young rotation.
If the Orioles reach the postseason, which would be the club’s first time in consecutive years since 1996-97, they’ll likely have Burnes there to start Game 1, hoping to ride his right arm to the promised land and end the franchise’s 40-season World Series drought — the sixth longest in MLB.
Baltimore’s starting pitchers struggled in the playoffs last year, and Burnes’ addition brings a dimension that many championship clubs possess, with Elias saying the 29-year-old right-hander “changes the whole complexion of our team.”
“It’s easy to see why they won 101 games last year,” Burnes said. “I’m looking forward to being a part of it this year. … It’s one of those years that expectations are high, so we’ve just got to go out and keep our heads down and play our best baseball.”
The last time the Orioles were this well-positioned to make a run was in the late 1970s. Sure, the 2012 to 2016 teams had success, reaching the AL Championship Series in 2014, and the 1996-97 clubs went to the ALCS in consecutive seasons. But those teams all fizzled after a few years of success, while these Orioles have the chance to sustain what they did in 2023 for years to come — precisely the vision of the rebuild when Elias was hired in November 2018.
“They’ve got this great young team,” Orioles legend and 1983 World Series MVP Rick Dempsey said. “They’ve got veterans, too, and good pitching with the addition of a Cy Young winner. Jiminy Christmas, there’s a lot of good things to look forward to.”
After losing the World Series in 1979, it took four seasons for the Orioles to reach the playoffs again, and Dempsey’s heroics, Scott McGregor’s left arm and Ripken’s catch of the final out brought the title home to Baltimore. That championship window quickly shut, though — proving the good times never last as long as it seems they will.
That’s why, perhaps, 2024 is the Orioles’ best chance to end the championship drought. Burnes is a free agent at the end of the season. Austin Hays, Anthony Santander and Cedric Mullins are, too, within the next two years. And, soon, Rutschman, Henderson and the club’s other young stars will no longer be paid the league minimum. As their salaries increase, putting talent around them will get harder — unless Rubenstein loosens the purse strings to a degree not seen in Baltimore since the first decade of the Angelos era.
But October is far away, and there’s no telling what changes Rubenstein will make as owner. Nevertheless, the Orioles’ future and present are equally bright.
Now it’s just time to play the games.