I have a dream, and it goes something like this.
It’s late October 2024, and a brisk autumn breeze is whipping down the narrow canyon of buildings that line West Pratt Street in Baltimore. On any other day, Pratt would be clogged with cars headed to the business offices and tourist attractions around the Inner Harbor. But this isn’t any other day. Pratt has been blocked off, and I, along with tens of thousands of joyous baseball fans, line the sidewalks as the Baltimore Orioles are paraded toward Camden Yards to celebrate the team’s first World Series championship in 41 years.
Was it only 41 years ago? It seemed longer.
Back here in the real world, the Orioles are bad … historically bad. And, until recently, they have been delusional. They started the 2018 season with hopes of contending for the American League East title and ended it with a 47-115 record. That’s a .290 win percentage, 15th-worst in Major League Baseball since 1900. From there, it’s been downhill. The Ringer recently wondered whether the “2019 Orioles might be the ’27 Yankees of awful.”
To be sure, we Orioles fans have seen a lot of awful, but that wasn’t always the case. For the past 50 years, I’ve lived and died — mostly died — with the Orioles. (And yes, it’s still too soon for me to talk about the inexplicable 1969 World Series loss to the “Amazin’ Mets.”) I was spoiled during those first 15 years by a team that played in five World Series and produced five first-ballot Hall of Famers. The past 35 years, however, have been a mostly joyless slog defined by periods of extreme ineptitude, including a record 21 consecutive losses to start the 1988 season and 14 consecutive losing seasons from 1998-2011, and peppered with occasional stretches of mediocrity.
The Orioles finally crashed and burned in 2018, leading to a midseason fire sale of their modest assets. What remained was a roster filled with career minor leaguers, waiver claims, and underperforming veterans. Like the city they represent, the Orioles have become a national punchline. After yet another recent demoralizing loss to the New York Yankees, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde summed it up this way: “It’s hard to watch.”
This probably is the point where you expect me to tell you that I’ve finally hit rock bottom, canceled my MLB TV subscription, and sworn off baseball. Hardly. The Orioles are headed for a second consecutive 100-loss season and likely another in 2020, but that’s by design. If you buy into the team’s long-term vision, as I have, this is an exciting time to be an Orioles fan.
It has become accepted wisdom in professional sports that teams have to get bad before they can get good. The Orioles aced the first step. Being bad has some advantages, as the Houston Astros proved. They went 162-324 from 2011-2013, but by 2017, they were World Series champions. The Orioles have embraced Houston’s model, even hiring former Astros executive Mike Elias, a 36-year-old Ivy Leaguer, to oversee the rebuild. Elias brought along Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer and one of baseball’s foremost authorities on analytics, which is the dark art of identifying undervalued players and exploiting competitive advantages.
While most fans’ attentions are focused on the slow-motion train wreck at Camden Yards, the real action is happening elsewhere, at minor-league affiliates in small towns such as Salisbury and Frederick, Maryland, and in countries such as the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
Over the past decade, the Orioles frequently traded away their top prospects for middling veterans. All that netted were three playoff cameos while drying up their already-thin talent pool. Now the focus is on stockpiling young talent and building a pipeline to talent-rich Latin America, where the Orioles previously had no presence. The early returns are promising. In July, the team signed 27 Latin American prospects. According to Baseball America, the Orioles’ minor-league system ranks eighth, up from No. 22 a year ago. I’ve become borderline obsessive with my daily tracking of minor-league box scores and stats, continually speculating as to which prospects could form the foundation of a championship team.
One of the lessons we learned from Houston is that this sort of teardown and rebuild doesn’t have to be perfect. The Astros whiffed on No. 1 overall draft picks in 2013 and 2014 yet still developed a deep talent pool. There’s not much fear that the Orioles made the same mistake. They used the No. 1 overall pick in the June amateur draft on the top collegiate player, Adley Rutschman, a polished, switch-hitting catcher who, if all goes according to plan, will be the face of a baseball renaissance in Baltimore.
The hope is that Rutschman will lead a parade of prospects to Camden Yards starting around 2021. If all goes according to plan, he’ll lead an even more memorable parade down Pratt Street a few years later.
Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for more than two decades, including the past 16 years as senior editor at Golfweek.
