Six years ago, before the Orioles’ most successful run in decades bottomed out, Anthony Santander surveyed the outfield at Double-A Bowie and made a proclamation to Cedric Mullins and Austin Hays.
“We are the future of this organization,” he told them.
As the Orioles prepare for their first full post-rebuild season, the trio is all part of Baltimore’s present. Pitchers John Means and Dillon Tate join Santander, Mullins and Hays as the five Orioles who played for the team each year from 2019 to now, a group that weathered the struggles through the rebuild to be part of the organization as it turns toward competitiveness.
“You don’t want to go back,” Means said. “You want to stay as far away from those years as possible.”
After a five-year stretch as the American League’s winningest team from 2012 to 2016, the Orioles collapsed to close the 2017 season, a prelude to a franchise-worst 115-loss campaign in 2018 in which they traded away many of their established players. That season prompted an organizational overhaul, and as the infrastructure of the franchise developed, the major league team endured three more seasons with one of baseball’s five worst records.
Last year appeared as if it could be a fourth before Baltimore turned its season around and finished just shy of a playoff berth. In recent weeks, Orioles CEO and Chairman John Angelos, executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias, and manager Brandon Hyde have declared the rebuild over.
That’s welcome news for the players who suffered through it.
“You go through that, and there’s no way that you’re gonna come out on the other side and start winning some games and get comfortable and get complacent and say, ‘OK, we’re past that now,'” Hays said. “You really don’t want to go back to that once you’ve been in it and you’ve seen the other side, and you’ve seen how much better it is when you’re winning.”
Constant change
Hays was called up at the end of 2017, the first member of the 2016 draft class to reach the majors. He struggled as the Orioles slumped down the stretch and opened the next year back in the minors, with injuries preventing him from making it back to the majors as the team weathered the 2018 season. When he returned late in 2019, it was the first time he faced the reality of the Orioles’ rebuild.
“It was a completely different team than what it was those couple years before,” Hays said. “That’s really what I remember, just coming up and the dugout being completely different from top to bottom.”
Change was constant throughout the rebuild. To spark it, the Orioles traded away All-Stars Manny Machado, Zack Britton, Jonathan Schoop, Darren O’Day and Brad Brach and former first-round draft pick Kevin Gausman in July 2018. Each subsequent year involved experienced players being dealt to other organizations, with young minor leaguers coming back to Baltimore in return.
Tate was among them, one of three pitchers the Orioles received from the New York Yankees for Britton in 2018. As he adapted to a new organization, he quickly noticed how behind the times it was in terms of analytics and technology. After a new front office, headed by Elias, took over ahead of the 2019 season, the first changes to the organization were apparent by spring training, Means said. Video and data showed pitchers their strengths and weakness, helping each understand their path to success.
“We had never got that,” Means said. “We didn’t have anything real close to that when I was coming up.”
Means made his debut late in 2018, with the Orioles desperate for pitching as the disastrous season winded down. Among the last players to make Baltimore’s opening day roster in 2019, he ended up being the team’s lone All-Star. From 2019 to 2021, the Orioles’ pitching staff was battered with regularity, but rarely when Means started.
In that first season, Baltimore set a league record for home runs allowed, establishing the mark with more than a month to play — “a little too early,” Means quipped. Both he and Tate were among a cycle of young pitchers getting opportunities they might not have gotten elsewhere.
The same applied offensively, with a lineup of castoffs and inexperienced players forced to prove themselves in the majors. Some, including Mullins, struggled to do so. Called up in 2018 as the heir apparent to longtime center fielder Adam Jones, he took the Orioles’ first at-bat under Hyde to open the 2019 season but was in the minors a month later, ending the year back in Bowie. He returned to the majors in 2020, a shortened season in which the Orioles were surprisingly in contention until late but still landed among the sport’s worst teams.
After abandoning switch-hitting to exclusively bat from the left side in 2021, Mullins became the first Oriole to record 30 home runs and 30 steals in the same season, starting the All-Star Game and earning a Silver Slugger Award. But despite his breakout, the Orioles finished tied for the majors’ worst record, becoming the first team since 1935 to lose at least 14 games in a row twice in one season.
“Even with the success I was having,” Mullins said, “it wasn’t as much fun not witnessing it for the rest of my guys.”
‘What are you playing for?’
Losing streaks and blowouts were frequent throughout the rebuilding years. Rosters littered with players who wouldn’t be in the majors with most other organizations were often outmatched.
“The days where it was the hardest were when it’s 12-1 in the sixth inning,” Hays said. “Unfortunately, we were playing a lot of games that were like that.”
Hays said he, Mullins and Santander helped keep one another focused in those games with reminders that their remaining at-bats still counted even if they were unlikely to alter the final score. “Opportunity” was a buzzword for the organization, pushing players to capitalize on theirs.
“You’re getting opportunities you might not get elsewhere,” Hays said. “You’re gonna get more opportunities than you would elsewhere because of the state of where we were. And that’s just what we preached: Take advantage of every opportunity you get.
“We were 40 games under .500. What are you playing for at that point?”
This spring brought a different dynamic, Hyde said, with a shift from scrapping for opportunities to compete “to be a part of something special.” The players hope that leads to a change in the enthusiasm level of those who follow the team.
The Orioles’ poor play led to meager crowds, even beyond the forced limitations the coronavirus pandemic prompted. Camden Yards, considered one of the sport’s gems, drew the third- and fifth-smallest average crowds of any venue in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
Ryan Mountcastle, the Orioles’ 2019 minor league player of the year, “knew it would be tough to get called up on a team that’s not doing great.” He debuted in 2020 in an empty ballpark, but even once fans were welcomed back the next year, the team’s struggles meant Camden Yards remained barren.
“It was just, like, no energy,” Mountcastle said. “You do something cool, and you want to hear the crowd, and it’s just maybe your mom out there behind home plate yelling. It’s like a travel ballgame.”
Coming off last season’s turnaround, they’re already sensing a change. Before spring training, the Orioles held events throughout Maryland, enabling fans to interact with players. The caravan also let the players see how excited fans have become.
“To be able to survive those days and see the state that we’re in now, you see the buzz start to come back into the city, see how many fans we have out there during the spring training, you can just feel it turning,” Hays said. “You can feel the city starting to get behind the players again.”
Before taking over Baltimore’s baseball operations department to oversee the rebuild, Elias served as a lieutenant in charge of scouting for the Houston Astros during their successful overhaul. Having now made it through two rebuilds, the Orioles’ general manager said he was unsure of the psychological impact successive years of drastic losing has on young players, saying it can either crush their confidence or help them build toughness.
But he believes the opportunities allowed for growth that might not have happened otherwise.
“To me, that is one of the byproducts that’s so powerful of fully rebuilding, perhaps even more so than the draft picks,” Elias said. “It’s the fact that you’re letting all these young players play.”
‘The bigger picture’
Santander, Hays and Mullins were once “the future.” Now, they’re surrounded by it.
The Orioles’ clubhouse this spring was littered with players who were products of the rebuild, acquired from trades, early draft picks and investments in the international market that fueled the Orioles’ status as baseball’s top farm system.
They never had to experience what the three outfielders, Tate and Means did. Last year’s team got off to a slow start, losing 24 of its first 40 games. Baltimore then called up top prospect Adley Rutschman, a catcher selected with the first overall draft pick in 2019 that came as a result of 2018’s league-worst record, and won 67 games — more victories than they had in any of the previous four seasons.
“The young talent, they’re just getting here, and they don’t know about that,” Santander said. “We’re proud of that: Being a [bad] team, losing 100 games, now becoming a competitive team, even with nobody else thinking we’re gonna do what we did last year.
“We learned from those failures. We’re happy and proud to be where we are right now. Now, we have to enjoy it.”
But even during last year’s turnaround, the Orioles still made the moves of a rebuilding club. Despite being in reach of a playoff spot at the end of July, the team traded away fan and clubhouse favorite Trey Mancini and All-Star closer Jorge López for a combined six minor league pitchers.
“It’s just one of those things where the bigger picture has to be kept in mind,” Mullins said.
Mancini reached the majors in 2016, the year of the Orioles’ most recent playoff appearance. After he was traded to Houston, he said he always hoped to see Baltimore’s rebuild through. He believed, with the team contending, he had done that.
Those who are still here hope to stick around through the good times they believe are coming. Santander and Means are scheduled to become free agents after the 2024 season. Mullins, Hays and Tate are under team control for another year beyond that. After years in which other teams “didn’t really take us that seriously,” as Tate put it, they want to bask in the Orioles’ new reality. The future has at last arrived.
“Whatever way the team’s going,” Tate said, “I’m trying to be a part of it.”
