After a 2023 season when they won a franchise-record 90 games, in addition to the International League championship and the Triple-A championship game, the O’s Norfolk Tides affiliate will begin defense of those titles Friday night at home versus the Durham Bulls.

Norfolk’s break-camp roster – which is subject to change before first pitch Friday – was released this afternoon and features three top-100 prospects and eight players currently ranked among the O’s top 22 prospects via the Baseball America top 30.

The Tides will begin this season playing for a few games without manager Buck Britton, who will be out on paternity leave to begin the year. O’s Florida Complex League manager Christian Frias will serve as acting manager in Britton’s absence. Britton is expected back at some point next week.

Jackson Holliday heads the 2024 Tides roster. Baseball America and MLBPipeline.com both rank Holliday - who played 22 games to end last year with the Tides, counting the playoffs - as the No. 1 prospect. Joining him on the Tides is Coby Mayo (No. 25, according to Baseball America, and No. 30 by MLBPipeline.com's reckoning) and Heston Kjerstad (No. 41 per Baseball America and No. 32 according to MLBPipeline.com).

Among Orioles prospects, Baseball America puts Mayo at No. 3 and Kjerstad at No. 5. The Tides' break-camp roster also includes from the Baseball America top 30 this group: Connor Norby (No. 6), Chayce McDermott (No. 8), Cade Povich (No. 9), Kyle Stowers (No. 16) and Justin Armbruester (No. 22).

It has been 50 years and that is probably long enough. The 1974 season ended with the Orioles in first place winning 91 games and the AL East. They won the AL East a year earlier too with 97 victories.

And 1974 is the last time they won the AL East in back-to-back years. Now, 50 years later, can they do it again?

Three reasons they could repeat.

Star power: Led by Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson the team has a talented duo that are both not only team leaders and big talents but are MVP candidates. They are indeed that good.

For the first time since 2001, the Orioles have a pitcher in their rotation that joined them after winning a Cy Young Award with another club. This is the fifth time this has happened per Elias Sports Bureau and previously involved Pat Hentgen, Doug Drabek, Fernando Valenzuela and Rick Sutcliffe. Hentgen was most recent to do this in 2001 until now when the Birds have 2021 NL Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes fronting their rotation.

For the Orioles and their fans, there must be both comfort and excitement in knowing that one of their best players is just 22 years old and might be about to get better.

Gunnar Henderson had a big spring – batting .417 and hitting a tape-measure homer Sunday - and now seems poised to have an even bigger year than last season with Opening Day now days away.

He won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 2023 after batting .255/.325/.489/.814 with 29 doubles, nine triples, 28 homers, 100 runs and 82 RBIs.

He finished second in the AL in triples, sixth in runs, 11^th in slugging and tied for 15^th in OPS. He was eighth in the league MVP voting.

After a slow start last season, he produced an OPS of .849 his last 117 games.

He can easily fly under the radar despite a 6-foot-8 frame. As a reliever it is harder to get noticed. But fully healthy during the 2023 season, right-hander Keagan Gillies did get noticed with some impressive stats and a big strikeout percentage.

Now 26, the Orioles’ 15^th-round draft pick out of Tulane in 2021 is rated as the club’s No. 30 prospect by Baseball America.

This after a season when he went a combined 5-1 with a 2.43 ERA for High-A Aberdeen and Double-A Bowie. Over 40 2/3 innings, he allowed just 19 hits with 14 walks and 61 strikeouts.

He posted an 0.81 WHIP, allowing a .137 batting average against, and fanned 13.5 batters per nine innings with a 39.8 K percentage.

That can get your attention.

The dates and maybe even the actual years they occurred all seem to run together now. But I think it was sometime during the year 1999 that I first met and had lunch with Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos.

At one point he said to me, "How is your sandwich?"

I said, "Really good, thanks." He asked more questions about how I felt about the restaurant (I don’t even remember which one now) and the food. I answered further. He paused a few seconds and then said, "Good, just checking. I bought this place last week."

All I could think to say was, "Good pickup for you, sir."

Over the next four years or so as sports director of the O’s flagship radio station WBAL Radio, I would get to know the man better and had several meetings with him each season at his Charles Street law offices.

As it turns out the bigger surprise may have come during the Winter Meetings in Nashville in December. For anyone then pondering whether Jackson Holliday could make the O's Opening Day roster after just 18 Triple-A games (22 counting playoffs), there was logic and reason to say that that was just too few. 

The kid could use more seasoning.

So reporters might have expected Mike Elias to say something like sure they love the kid, he’s a remarkable talent and they’ll take a long look in spring training.

Instead, he raised a few eyebrows when he stated he was “a very strong possibility” to make the OD roster.

But, after all that and Holliday at age 20 having a strong spring camp, he will not make it. Surprised again. I was anyway, speaking for one.

Orioles' manager Brandon Hyde dropped some nuggets of information on his ballclub pregame Thursday in Fort Myers, Fla. Before the Orioles played the Red Sox, he announced the order of the starting rotation to begin the year and told reporters that Jorge Mateo would make the Opening Day roster.

We already knew that new ace Corbin Burnes would start the opener on March 28. But Hyde said he would be followed in order by Grayson Rodriguez, Tyler Wells, Dean Kremer and Cole Irvin.

With an off day on the second day of the season, the Orioles could have brought Burnes back for the fifth game of the year. Now he is set to start Game 6 after the first turn through the rotation.

Some are already speculating that Mateo's roster inclusion will make it harder for Jackson Holliday to make it. I don't see it that way just yet. But I guess yes if Ramon Urias makes the roster and there are no injuries or trades, it potentially could be more challenging.

I still see the kid on the roster for the opener.

A few odds and ends as there are now just a few spring games left. An odd number of five actually and that will be the end of spring training in 2024.

We are all about ready for a new season to start at this point.

Rookie fav: We don’t even know for sure yet whether the Orioles Jackson Holliday will be on the Opening Day roster. But according to DraftKings Sportsbook, he is the favorite to win the American League Rookie of the Year Award:

* O’s Jackson Holliday at +250.

* Texas’ Evan Carter at +300.

When it comes to the Orioles, we have seen it happen in recent years, we have seen it happen last year and we have a historical perspective of it as well.

It is that a young player, even those ranked as No. 1 prospects in the sport, can and often do struggle at the outset of their major league careers.

Two words come to mind - patience and expectations. Patience to give the young player time to settle in and feel comfortable at the big league level and to start to put up numbers. And expectations which must be managed early on for that player. It’s OK to have high expectations, we should for top prospects, but it is also ok to give them time to realize the expectations. Often a lot of time.

Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson are now emerging stars on the Orioles and already considered among the top players in the game. They have at least a couple of things in common in that both shot up to No. 1 in prospect rankings and both had some early career struggles.

Hard to believe it now, but Rutschman, who had his MLB debut on May 21, 2022, was 13-for-74 after his first 20 games with 18 strikeouts and no RBIs. That is zero RBIs. He was batting .176/.256/.257/.513 at that point. Over 113 games on the 2022 season he would hit .254/.362/.445/.806 and finished second for the Rookie of the Year award and 12^th in the MVP voting.

We hear big league managers and front office types say something similar early each spring training. They hope there are a lot of tough decisions to make at the end of their camp. They hope a lot of players play well.

It doesn’t always happen. It probably doesn’t often happen.

For the Orioles, this year, it did happen.

Kyle Stowers is batting .297 with an OPS of 1.181 and seven spring homers. Colton Cowser is batting .364/1.246 with four long balls. Coby Mayo is batting .366/1.068. Even a more veteran player like Errol Robinson has gone 6-for-16 this spring. Tyler Nevin has hit .302 and Connor Norby is 6-for-20.

On the mound, the Orioles have nine pitchers with ERAs of 0.00 that have thrown at least three innings.

For a player who had a year where he dealt with multiple groin injuries and finished the year struggling so badly, O’s center fielder Cedric Mullins still had his moments in the 2023 season.

He hit for the cycle May 12, had a five-hit game and also hit two grand slams. On Sept. 18 at Houston, he hit a 425-foot, go-ahead three-run homer in the ninth inning. And he became the first player to both rob and hit a home run in the ninth inning or later of the same game over the last 10 seasons on Aug. 13 at Seattle. That was according to ESPN Stats & Info and marked his first career go-ahead homer in extra innings.

He sure had some big moments and games but still hit for him what was a less than expected .233/.305/.416/.721 for an OPS+ of 101.

He’s now 30 and two years removed from the first 30-30 season (homers and steals) in O’s history in 2021. He produced an .878 OPS then and was ninth in the MVP voting.

But his last two years were not close to that, and he was 0-for-12 in the American League Division Series last October and just 2-for-45 his last 14 games, counting the postseason.

The Orioles' Spring Breakout game has come and gone. They lost the seven-inning contest 3-1 on Thursday night in Bradenton to the Pittsburgh Pirates' prospects.

Who expected the O’s pitching prospects to outshine the hitters? But the O’s batters in that game got just one hit in 20 at-bats. And that was a bunt hit by Enrique Bradfield Jr. He blazed his way down the first-base line, showing off his 80-grade speed. Luis Valdez also showed off his speed in stealing two bases, leading to Jud Fabian’s deep sac fly in the Baltimore second.

But Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo, Samuel Basallo and Connor Norby went a combined 0-for-7.

The O’s chose to use just two pitchers, and lefty Cade Povich and right-hander Trace Bright each gave up one earned run. Each fanned four batters, and Bright in particular showed some swing-and-miss secondaries, including a big breaking curveball, to go with a lively fastball that he could elevate at 95 mph.

The game allowed the O’s to show off 15 of their top 30 prospects, seven from their top 10 and three from the top 100, including the No. 1 prospect in the game, Holliday.

While the Orioles know they will begin their season without either right-hander Kyle Bradish or lefty John Means in their pitching rotation, they now also know that the New York Yankees will begin the year without 2023 American League Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole.

Cole and the Yankees got some good news this week, in that his elbow ailment seems limited to inflammation and no surgery or procedures will be needed. But reports say he will miss one-to-two months or as one report put it, as many as 10-to-12 weeks.

If it’s on the long side of things, he could be out until around mid-June give or take a week or so. The Orioles play the Yankees four times from April 29-May 2 and three times from June 18-20. But more than the potential seven games he could miss between the teams, it’s the nearly half-season of games he might miss.

Since 2020 with the Yankees, Cole has gone 51-23 with a 3.08 ERA and 1.011 WHIP and is consistently among the best pitchers in the game. He has twice finished second for the Cy Young award and been in the top five six times.

Last season he was 15-4 with a 2.63 ERA and 0.981 WHIP with 222 strikeouts. He was a unanimous winner of the Cy Young award with the O’s Bradish finishing fourth in the voting.

Right-hander Seth Johnson was a promising young pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays farm system. In college he converted from shortstop to the mound at Campbell University and then Tampa Bay drafted him 40^th overall in the 2019 season.

He had a breakout 2021 season on the Rays' watch at Low-A ball, pitching to an ERA of 2.88 over 23 games but his next season was cut short by an elbow issue and Tommy John surgery was going to be needed.

That was a major setback but not all the big news he was going to have to deal with. Set for surgery that would happen on Aug. 3, 2022, he flew into Arlington, Tex. two days earlier ahead of the procedure and then his phone rang. He was traded to the Orioles in a three-team deal that sent Trey Mancini to Houston.

Time to get a new and improved elbow and a new team.  

“The day I got traded I was in Arlington for the surgery, and I was planning on going to the Rangers game that night and they were playing the Orioles. So, I got to see the team I was traded to about three hours after the trade,” Johnson recalled with a laugh in Sarasota, Fla. recently.

This time last year, the Orioles Jackson Holliday and Samuel Basallo – now the club’s top two rated prospects – were a couple of weeks away from reporting to Low-A Delmarva to start the 2023 season.

A year later both have continued to impress and progress as prospects and now they are two of the best in the sport. While Holliday is everyone’s No. 1 prospect, Basallo is ranked No. 10 by Baseball America, No. 17 by MLBPipeline.com and No. 27 by ESPN.com.

Two studs to help lead the best farm system in the sport and both could be in the lineup tonight at 7:05 p.m. when the O’s prospects play the Pittsburgh Pirates prospects in Bradenton in the Spring Breakout game that will be televised live by MLB Network.

Basallo played in his first spring game Monday and went 0-for-3 combined Monday and Tuesday. He has a stress fracture in his throwing elbow and is not ready to catch yet but can take at-bats in games as the DH.

If Holliday and Basallo are in the lineup together it will be the first time for that duo since they played for Delmarva late last April, before Holliday was moved to High-A Aberdeen. By the time Basallo later got to Aberdeen, Holliday had moved to Double-A Bowie and by the time Basallo played four games to end his 2023 season at Bowie, Holliday had moved to Triple-A Norfolk.

There may be few players that know their game and understand the strengths they need to play to during a baseball game more than O’s outfield prospect Enrique Bradfield Jr.

He has blazing speed – scouts say it's a top-of-scale 80 scouting grade – but little power to this point. He knows the style of game he needs to play and it’s similar to what we might call an old-school leadoff hitter. One that needs to make a lot of contact, often keep the ball out of the air and use his legs to make things happen.

Bradfield was the Orioles' top draft pick last summer, taken No. 17 overall out of Vanderbilt, where he stole 130 bases with a 91 percent success rate in three seasons.

For quite a while now, Bradfield has known he’s the fastest player on most baseball fields. He has elite speed.

“I would say it was about when I was 10 or 11 that I started to really recognize that,” he said in a recent interview in Sarasota at Twin Lakes Park. “It’s always been a part of who I am, but I wouldn’t say it’s everything to what I do. I was gifted a beautiful gift from God and at the same time too I have worked very hard to get to where I am at. And also, there are other factors like a support system with my family, my parents, my sister and countless coaches I could name that all have impacted me.”

On Dec. 4, Jackson Holliday, the No. 1 prospect in baseball, turned 20. He was a teenager no more. The next day at the Winter Meetings in Nashville, O’s executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias let the world know the kid had a good chance to make the O's 2024 Opening Day roster.

"It's definitely a very strong possibility,” Elias said that day, getting reporters attention in stating it so strongly.

Fast forward to this spring camp and the kid that is 20 is starting to really swing it well in spring games. After getting two hits versus the Yankees in Tampa Monday afternoon, he is 10-for-31, batting .323/.344/.613/.957 with two doubles, two triples and a homer. He is 6-for-14 his last four games.

Manager Brandon Hyde said the stat sheet will be just a small part of the evaluation of Holliday. But the kid is handling everything well thus far, from opponent pitchers like the Phillies Zack Wheeler and Toronto’s Yusei Kikuchi, to every national reporter that wants his time to the fans that clamor for autograph.

He fits in well in a clubhouse where he is the young guy and the rookie and to me, he is looking like someone with a great chance to break north for the opener. Just like Elias said in December.

This spring the announcement of the Orioles' Opening Day starter seemed to come earlier than it has most years. But why wait? There were no surprises when manager Brandon Hyde told reporters Sunday in camp that right-hander Corbin Burnes will be first up March 28 versus the Los Angeles Angels.

The Orioles acquired their new ace Feb. 1, and he will indeed pitch the first game of their 2024 season, and many more this year, they hope.

During a lengthy one-on-one interview last Friday in the Baltimore clubhouse, I asked Burnes what kind of club he sees from his new teammates.

“It’s a great young group,” said Burnes, 29, the 2021 National League Cy Young Award winner. “I think the best part about this group is they are so young. It’s a team that had guys that were in their first or second year in the big leagues last year, and so getting that experience at the big league level is unmatched. Even guys that only played 15-20 games, you just can’t replicate that anywhere else.

“So, coming into this year, guys have a year or two of that experience. You learn how to play at this level, you learn how to prepare and bounce back each day to be at your best. The fact this group is so young and hungry to keep competing versus being an older group that’s done it for so many years, these guys are still trying to figure out their spot in the game. That’s exciting. They are going to play their butts off. A team that won 101 games last year and could be even better now.”

After spending about a week at spring training, one impression that struck me is how hard some players worked over the winter to get better. And it’s not just the hard work they put in, but that much of it is very specific, very targeted, and there is a clear plan at work. 

It is one of many things this organization is doing well right now. They take good players and make many of them better. Heck, they have taken some little-known players and some that once looked like longshots to make and/or help the team and turned them into All-Stars.

That has happened over the last few years for relievers Félix Bautista and Yennier Cano. Both were 2023 All-Stars for the Orioles.

Bautista’s first pro year was 2012 with Miami. The Marlins released him in 2016. On Aug. 4, 2016 the Orioles signed him. Through 2018 on their watch he never got out of rookie ball. In 2019 and 2021, he walked nearly six batters per nine innings on the farm. That same pitcher had a 3.5 walk rate and 1.85 ERA in 2022 and 2023. In the big leagues.

Cano in 2022 gave up 23 runs in 18 major league innings. A year later he started the season lights-out with the Orioles, was an All-Star and had a 2.11 ERA.

SARASOTA, Fla. – Here is yet another reason to praise the Orioles organization: making more good decisions on their farm.

Last year, they took a minor league pitcher that had thrown a combined 44 2/3 innings out of the bullpen in the 2021 and 2022 minor league seasons and made him a starter.

They saw something and the move worked. Right-hander Alex Pham, mostly a reliever in college and exclusively a reliever in his first two pro seasons, had a huge year as a starter pitching at High-A Aberdeen and Double-A Bowie.

He went 3-5 with an ERA of 2.57. Over 112 innings he allowed 72 hits, posting a .182 average against and 1.02 WHIP. He recorded a 3.4 walk rate and 10.5 K per nine rate. He had 13.3 K per nine rate with Aberdeen, where he went 2-0 with a 1.54 ERA in May and was the South Atlantic League Pitcher of the Month.

Yep, this starting thing was indeed working out.