In October 2019, I talked to Baltimore Orioles general manager Mike Elias for a new afterword to the paperback edition of my book about player development, The MVP Machine. The Houston Astros, Elias’s former team, were at the peak of their powers, still weeks away from becoming the team that everybody boos. The Orioles were near their nadir, having won 101 games in the 2018 and 2019 seasons combined. In Houston, Elias had been to the bottom of the standings, but it wasn’t clear that his new team could climb out of its self-deepened hole the way his old one had. Other teams had picked up the Astros’ non-trash-can tricks—tanking, shifting, helping players improve—and the tactics that had turned the intentionally terrible ’Stros into baseball’s best team could backfire or fail to pay dividends in Baltimore. “It scares me and it keeps me up at night to think about what some of these teams are doing,” Elias said, adding, “It’s intimidating for those of us that are trying to get there.”
Four years later, the Orioles are there. They just won 101 games in a single season, the most for the franchise since 1979, and though the Astros’ run is still going, the Orioles topped their 2023 total by 11 wins (albeit with an identical run differential). The Orioles just won one of the strongest divisions ever, and they’re the team that must most scare the AL East rivals that used to trounce them. The ’Stros are a sunset, the O’s a sunrise. And the new day that’s dawned in Baltimore illuminates a leaguewide trend toward prospects who come up earlier and produce right away.
Last month, FanGraphs’ David Laurila asked Yankees skipper Aaron Boone about the teams that most impressed him this season, mentioning that the Braves had been a popular response among other managers. “The Braves are great, yes,” Boone said. “But Baltimore, and what they’ve become over the last year-plus, kind of coinciding with Adley Rutschman getting called up … they’re really good.”
The Orioles will take on the Rangers—who, like Baltimore, are making their first postseason appearance since 2016—in the ALDS starting Saturday. The O’s haven’t yet proved that they’ve constructed the perennial regular-season favorite or impregnable postseason powerhouse the Astros assembled, and they’re looking for the franchise’s first World Series in 40 years. But they’ve already improved more rapidly than the Astros—or, for that matter, virtually any other team—ever has.
The Astros got good gradually. From their low of 51 wins in 2013—the end of a depressing period that featured more losses in a three-season span than any team had suffered since the expansion Mets in the ’60s—the Astros improved to 70 wins in 2014 and 86 in 2015. Then they took a small step back to 84 in 2016, missing the playoffs, before first entering triple-digit territory with 101 wins in the fateful World Series–winning 2017 campaign.
The Orioles won 52 games in 2021, the third time in four years they’d lost at least 108 games. (They might’ve made it four in a row if not for the pandemic.) Last year, their total skyrocketed by 31 wins, to 83—not quite enough for a playoff berth, but enough to stave off elimination until the eve of October. In AL-NL history, 59 teams before the O’s had improved by at least 25 wins from one season to the next (excluding seasons after 2020 or the 1981 or 1994 strike years). On average, those teams declined by 10.4 wins the following year—regression to the mean, or Bill James’s “Plexiglass Principle,” at work.
In the divisional era (since 1969), only two teams that leaped forward by 25-plus wins managed not to go backward the next year: the 1977-78 Brewers, who went up by two more wins in 1979 (and won a pennant in ’82), and the 1990-91 Braves, who added four more wins in ’92 and went on to dominate the NL East for the next 15 years. Those were the best-case scenarios in modern times. A lot has to go right to produce a 25-win bump, and odds are it won’t all go as right, or even more right, two years in a row.
Sure enough, FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus projected the Orioles to win 7.3 and 9.5 fewer games, respectively, which would have been in line with that typical pattern. Orioles owner John Angelos, for one, didn’t seem to disagree: In February, he appeared to pump the brakes on expectations for this season, saying, “Now, we all know this year could …” before cutting himself off. The 2022 team, he noted, “overachieved and overperformed,” which sounded like the words of someone who was bracing the fan base for a falloff. Either that, or someone who was trying to justify his stingy approach to payroll. (Rarely has the fun differential between a team and its owner been greater than this.)
Of course, instead of fading, the O’s tacked on another 18 wins. Only one other team has ever improved by 25-plus wins one year and more than 18 the next: the 1902-04 Giants, who went from 48 to 84 to 106 after the arrival of Hall of Fame manager John McGraw, who brought with him multiple Hall of Fame players raided from the roster of McGraw’s former team.
If we run through the same exercise with run differential, we see similar results. The O’s went up by 283 runs from 2021 to 2022. Eighty-one previous teams had seen their run differentials go up by at least 200, and on average, they lost 62.8 runs the next year. The O’s gained 143, the biggest additional increase since the 1884-86 Detroit Wolverines and the 1925-27 Yankees.
Back-to-back improvements of this magnitude just don’t happen, which explains why Brandon Hyde is the only manager since Connie Mack—who helmed the Philadelphia A’s for 50 seasons and at least part-owned the team for most of that time—to manage a team to 100-plus losses and remain in place long enough to manage the same team to 100-plus wins. It’s easier to weather a rebuild if it doesn’t last too long, and if the team transitions from cellar dweller to contender so suddenly that the front office doesn’t have a chance to switch from a “rebuild mode” manager to a “win now” manager. In a short span of time, Hyde has been both.
So how did the Orioles defy the precedents, probabilities, and projections? As Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus wrote recently, it was a true team effort. Granted, some luck was involved: The O’s beat their Pythagorean record expectation by seven wins, and their BaseRuns record by 12 wins, which easily led the league. They also stayed healthier than all but a few other teams. Beyond that, both their rotation and (especially) their bullpen exceeded expectations. They also got great, unexpected performances from a couple of castoffs: Ryan O’Hearn, who entered the season with a career 81 wRC+ with the Royals and turned 30 in July, broke out to the tune of a 118 wRC+ as a roving corner man. Aaron Hicks, whom the Yankees released in late May, put up a 129 wRC+ with Baltimore after slumping to a 49 in New York. The O’s deserve credit for coaching them up.
But they also deserve—and have received—ample acclaim for building and deploying baseball’s best farm system (for two years running). Because they’ve been so bad for so long at the big league level, they’ve had high draft picks, but they’ve also made the most of them, hitting on pick after pick. They’ve also ramped up their once-woeful international-scouting efforts, which has yielded blue-chippers such as 19-year-old Dominican catcher/first baseman Samuel Basallo. In Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Jackson Holliday, the O’s have had three no. 1 overall prospects in quick succession, and those are just the headliners. Even after all the promotions over the past two seasons, the O’s still have six prospect-eligible players among MLB Pipeline’s top 50.
And I do mean all the promotions. The Orioles have already tied the record (seven) for the most Baseball America preseason top-100 prospects to make their major league debuts over the course of any two consecutive seasons since the BA rankings began in 1990:
Most Top-100 Debuts Over Two Seasons
In fact, the Orioles could have claimed the top spot for themselves if Baseball America had placed Heston Kjerstad in its 2023 top 100, as some other outlets did. (Kjerstad, who reached the majors in September, made BA’s list in 2021, but not this spring.) Or, for that matter, if they had called up Holliday or Connor Norby, who made it up to Triple-A. (Coby Mayo, yet another highly touted infielder who’s raked at Triple-A, cracked some preseason lists, but not BA’s.) Really, it wasn’t a dearth of additional prospects that kept the Orioles from shattering the record for ranked-prospect debuts; it was that they’d already promoted so many sensational players that they didn’t have room on the roster for more.
The Orioles famously haven’t been swept in 91 consecutive regular-season series of two-plus games, which rates third all time. Their sweepless streak dates back to when they dropped three straight in Detroit from May 13 to 15, 2022. Less than a week later, Rutschman debuted for the then-16-24 team, and the O’s have been a different ballclub ever since. It’s easy to imagine them moving, benching, or bidding goodbye to some redundant, lower-ceiling veterans (Jorge Mateo, Ramón Urías, Adam Frazier), trading prospect depth (Joey Ortiz?) for pitching, and entering next season with a lineup full of phenoms, as well as older (but not old) stalwarts such as Cedric Mullins, Anthony Santander, Austin Hays, and Ryan Mountcastle. This team is absolutely stacked, and it could get more stacked still if Elias can mentally move into “win now” mode, learn to loosen his grasp on surplus prospects, and accept that it’s OK if going for it makes his precious prospect rankings fall. And, of course, if Angelos will spend on free agents and extensions now that the team’s lucrative lease agreement is settled. The Astros have never been baseball’s biggest spenders, but after they got good (and got older), they eventually became regulars in the payroll top 10.
The Orioles’ infusion of youth is in line with (and to some degree, leading) leaguewide trends. Last year’s rookie class was strong. This year’s is even stronger, particularly on the position-player side: Only 2015’s rookie class of position players amassed a higher WAR. Only 2018 yielded more WAR by position players 26 and under, and only 2018 and 2015 saw more WAR by position players 25 and under.
fWAR by Rookie Position Players
These upticks are probably related to optimized player development and, in turn, more rapid prospect-promotion timetables. As Zach Buchanan wrote last month for Defector, teams seem to be advancing prospects more aggressively than they have in recent years. This could be the case for any number of reasons: new incentives in the CBA that have combated service-time manipulation and made teams more likely to promote prospects when they’re ready. The contraction of the minor leagues, which has left fewer rungs on the minor league ladder to climb. Owners’ preference for cost-controlled players making the major league minimum—which, through the success of prospect-rich clubs like the Orioles, Twins, Diamondbacks, and Reds, has weakened the correlation between spending and winning. Better (read: less horrendous) minor league living conditions, nutrition, and pay. Ball-, bat-, and body-tracking tech that gives teams confidence in their evaluations of young players in smaller samples of performance. Customized, data-driven instruction in amateur ball and the minor leagues that has prepared players to be productive sooner. A high-speed brand of baseball that lends itself to youth. A growing recognition that it’s beneficial to push players to be better: Just as it helps to take batting practice not against glorified lobs from aging coaches, but against challenging pitches that actually look like the ones you’ll face in games, it makes sense to ensure that prospects are always learning, practicing, and improving.
As Orioles pitcher John Means told me back in 2019, comparing Elias’s player-development methods to the Orioles’ previous process, “Instead of going out there and seeing what happens, it’s a little more math-related. It’s almost like they’re giving you the answers.” Reflecting on his own overhaul as a pitcher, he admitted, “If I would’ve kept doing the same thing, I do think that I probably would have been out of baseball. If I would have done it sooner, I probably would have been in the big leagues a lot sooner.” Maybe that’s what’s happening for today’s prospects. It’s tough to untangle the effects of the canceled 2020 minor league season, which deprived players of in-game reps, but hitters and pitchers are making the majors with less minor league playing time under their belts than they were several years ago—and on the whole, they don’t seem to be showing any ill effects.
There’s an old stathead saying, “There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect.” The expression mostly signified that injury risk makes pitchers undependable—but it also suggested that teams shouldn’t let them fritter away too many major-league-quality innings in minor league games. Maybe teams are adopting that (growth) mindset about most prospects now. Essentially, smoke ’em if you got ’em—or let them smoke your playoff opponents.
Prospect-promotion preferences and results do vary by team, as the GIF below of ranked-hitter and ranked-pitcher debuts since 2018 shows:
Some of this difference comes down to small samples of prospects and the vagaries of openings in the majors. (If we went back further, we’d have a bigger sample, but one that was less representative of how the teams operate today.) It’s safe to say, though, that the Angels are especially bullish about their prospects—or the most desperate for reinforcements. Nolan Schanuel, a 2023 draftee who debuted for the big club this season after only 97 minor league PAs, had the least pre-promotion seasoning of any non-international hitter in the dataset, followed by another 2023 Angels debutant, Zach Neto (201 PAs). (In fairness to the Angels, neither of those players has looked completely overmatched.) On the pitching side, Oakland’s Mason Miller (103 batters faced) was on the fastest track, though two recent Angels arrivals, Chase Silseth (126 BF) and Ben Joyce (127 BF), weren’t much slower.
There is some risk in promoting players too fast. In September 1955, 18-year-old future Orioles legend Brooks Robinson made his major league debut after a mere 415 plate appearances in the minor leagues, all in a setting—the Class B Piedmont League—three levels from the majors. In his first big league game, he went 2-for-4. Afterward, still high on his hits, the conquering hero called his parents in Little Rock and announced, “I’m here in the majors to stay. This is my cup of tea. I don’t know what I was doing in the minors this year.”
In his next five games, he went 0-for-18 with 10 strikeouts, before being benched.
Robinson’s glove was already superb, but his bat wasn’t ready—and wouldn’t fully mature for several more seasons. Now, while Orioles fans mourn the loss of the late Robinson, their attention is trained on another teen who’s tried his hand at third base: Holliday, Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year. The 2022 first overall draft pick sped through four levels of the minors this season, starting in A ball and wrapping up at Triple-A. He either raked or held his own at every level, despite being two years younger than the league average in A ball and seven years younger at Triple-A. He’s already made more minor league plate appearances (671) than Robinson had before he got the call, albeit not as many as most prospects so young would traditionally receive. Which may not mean much at a time when YOLO is triumphing over tradition in prospect promotion. Maybe Holliday will be ready when the next opening arises.
That’s the sort of thought that now keeps other GMs awake, as they gaze upon the youthful, fun, formidable, and, yes, “sustainable” foundation that the Orioles have laid down through an awful lot of losing and astute scouting and developing. It’s also the sort of thought that keeps O’s fans awake in anticipation of the next gift they’re given from the most fecund farm system of all.
Thanks to Lucas Apostoleris, Robert Au, Jessie Barbour, and David Appelman for research assistance.
