An Offseason Of Uncertainty

At 7:42 PM on October 2, 2024, the honeymoon phase for this era of Orioles baseball ended.  

Gunnar Henderson’s strikeout against Lucas Erceg put the finishing touches on a season that began with optimism and ended with a whimper. 

If 2022 was the first sign of success and 2023 was the team becoming a true contender, 2024 was meant to be the year where they put it all together.  

The roster that won the American League East was largely unchanged and massively upgraded its rotation by swapping out Kyle Gibson for Corbin Burnes. Meanwhile, young stars like Henderson and Adley Rutschman entered 2024 with both postseason experience and the feeling of unfinished business.  

While replacing Felix Bautista did loom large, there were still overwhelmingly optimistic feelings about the 2024 Orioles. 

As the Orioles ended the first half with a record of 58-38, that optimism certainly seemed warranted. They entered the All-Star break a game of ahead of the New York Yankees in the AL East and trailed the Cleveland Guardians by half a game for the best record in the AL.  

The second half, however, went much worse. The Orioles went 33-33 to close out the year, spending over two months playing like an average team. A 5-1 end to the regular season seemed like a sign of life, but it wound up being fool’s gold. 

Of course, what makes me believe this is the end of the honeymoon phase for this team isn’t just the postseason failure, but what comes next: an offseason of uncertainty. 

The biggest source of uncertainty surrounds two of the team’s best players: Corbin Burnes and Anthony Santander. 

The Orioles have thus far been fortunate to avoid worrying about any major players hitting free agency, but now they find themselves in quite the pickle of hoping to keep their ace and their 40-homer slugger in the same offseason. 

After another season of over 190 innings and an ERA+ above 125, Burnes should enter this offseason aiming to become the highest-paid pitcher in the sport. Across the last three years, Burnes has thrown the third-most innings in baseball and has the fifth-best ERA+ among the 29 pitchers with over 450 innings in the past three seasons.  

Burnes provides a combination of availability and run prevention that is increasingly hard to find in a sport filled with injury-prone strikeout artists and innings eaters with ERA’s much higher than Burnes’.  

Meanwhile, Santander put together quite the contract year by hitting 44 homers. We knew going into 2024 that Santander was a good power hitter after hitting 33 homers in 2022 and 28 last year, but he went from a good power hitter to a great one after hitting the third-most homers in the league this year.  

Much like Burnes, Santander’s production also included a clean bill of health. Santander appeared in over 150 games for the third straight year and is just one of 26 players to appear in over 450 games across the last three years.  

While switch-hitting outfielders who can hit 40 homers don’t exactly grow on trees, I’d still expect Santander to get much less than Burnes just because he’s not a great fielder or baserunner. However, Santander should still expect to get one of the best contracts for any corner outfielder/designated hitter on the market this offseason. 

The uncertainty around these upcoming free agents also comes from the fact that we have no idea how how much David Rubenstein is willing to spend and how Mike Elias wants to allocate Rubenstein’s money.  

While Rubenstein has made a great first impression as Baltimore’s new owner, he has yet to oversee any sort of extension or other major financial commitment. You’d certainly hope he didn’t buy this team to be a cheapskate, but there’s still a huge gap between spending like the Oakland A’s and spending like the New York Yankees.  

It’s entirely possible that the Orioles have the money to keep Burnes and Santander but they might also prefer for those funds to be used on players like Henderson and Rutschman.  

We simply have no idea what the highest payroll of the Rubenstein era will look like, but keeping Burnes and/or Santander would certainly demonstrate that it will be significantly higher than the payrolls of the 2022-2024 teams. 

Regardless of how much the Orioles are willing to spend, there’s also uncertainty when it comes to trades.  

After moving players like Joey Ortiz, Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, the Orioles now find themselves somewhat lacking in what I’d consider the middle class of trade chips. All three of these players were major-league ready prospects without a path to playing time, but not quite top-10 prospects the organization would stress over losing.  

Now the Orioles are seemingly missing this kind of prospect and will need to decide between moving a big name, opting to make modest trades that only bring back depth or hoping another team is really high on someone like Dylan Beavers.  

Moving someone like Coby Mayo could be tough to swallow, but is it any tougher to swallow than replacing Burnes with another underwhelming innings eater? 

The Orioles have built a solid core that should be able to remain a contender for the next several years. However, the decisions made this offseason could go a long towards determining if their contention window will ever amount to anything more than just getting swept.