Some chatter about extending young stars and keeping Burnes

Money will be spent over the winter, the first under the new ownership group. The Orioles could have 16 players eligible for arbitration and raises are coming. They will check the free-agent market for upgrades. They could inherit contracts through trades that bump up the payroll, as they did with starters Corbin Burnes and Zach Eflin. Other contracts will drop from the books.

This is business as usual. But fans want to know about the possibility of the unusual.

Will the Orioles extend some of their young players to keep them under team control and away from free agency?

An absolute, crystal-clear answer isn’t forthcoming but it remains a topic that periodically is tossed at executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias. Other teams do it. The Orioles have their obvious candidates from a farm system that previously was ranked first in baseball.

Elias appeared on a recent edition of the New York Post podcast “The Show” and indicated again that the club has talked about it. However, Elias isn’t going to share too much with the public for the same reasons that he’s stated in the past – it can only hurt the club and could impact an agent’s trust in him.

Don’t take it personally, but it’s none of our business.

The only difference from past inquiries is that Elias is operating under control person David Rubenstein instead of John Angelos.

“I think my read of this ownership group is they have the wherewithal to allow us to run this franchise optimally, and there is a lot that goes into that,” Elias said. “You look at teams from around the league in various market sizes and there are different ways to run the team, but you just can’t do everything that you want to do. And it requires some measurement at times.

“All of that being said, you look at our group of young players right now, we do have an impressive young group that’s been drafted here, home grown, with good heads on their shoulders, and there are many of them where you look at them and go, ‘Man, I wish we had these guys longer than they’re currently contracted for.’ And that’s a big part of the equation. We know that. It’s something we work on quietly in the background and I don’t talk about what we’re doing or not doing, but it would certainly be front and center for a front office to be working on those things.

“But they’re not easy to line up on, and effort doesn’t always equate to results. But we very much love a lot of these players that we have and we will be making every responsible attempt to examine ways to keep them, if we think that’s in the best interest of building the team long term.”

So basically, Elias is marking extensions as a smart idea and one that’s already been explored to some degree. We know that he’s had conversations with agent Scott Boras, who represents Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday and Jordan Westburg. Rubenstein already has talked to Boras. It could mean a lot or result in nothing. And Elias is going to be asked about it again.

Boras also reps ace Corbin Burnes and already is working on his spontaneous quips for the Winter Meetings. He’s gonna fire off some gems, just like his client. And the Burnes binder will have more pages than the Kardashian diaries.

Elias surrendered DL Hall and Joey Ortiz to rent Burnes, and the trade didn’t net a championship. It didn’t come close. But it was bold and exactly what the Orioles should have done in their post-rebuild phase of the operation.

Free agency hasn’t started and Elias can’t talk about specific players. Again, though, it doesn’t stop media from asking about the chances of signing Burnes to a mega-contract.

“We made a major trade to bring in Corbin Burnes coming off the season we came off last year,” Elias said on the podcast. “Getting a front-line starter was kind of what the doctor ordered for our team, or at least that was my estimation. With Corbin, you’re not only getting talent, but you’re also getting bulk, and he held up his end of the bargain. He threw 194 innings, was in the Cy Young conversation for most of the year, spun an absolute gem in the playoffs - we just didn’t score for him - and it was impressive seeing him do his thing like clockwork, making every start over the full season.

“He’s terrific and any team would love to have him, but there’s a lot of business that goes into that, and somebody accrues six years of service in the major leagues, they earn rights and we’re going to have to go through the entirety of what comes next when that takes place. There are steps this month that we’ll have to work through. He was spectacular for us for most of the season. He was spectacular in the playoffs. And he has a very bright future.”

Probably won’t be in Baltimore, but Elias isn’t saying it.

If Burnes bolts, let’s see if the Orioles make a similar splashy move for another No. 1 starter or aims more mid-rotation knowing that Eflin and Grayson Rodriguez are back.

“Given the backdrop of how we got to 2023, I did feel urgency to address what I thought we needed to intensify our odds to repeat in the division or come close to it,” Elias said during his season-ending press conference.

“It didn’t work out. I think that desire was coming from a healthy and well-placed place, and my intentions, wanting to do that for this team with what I thought was going to be another step forward, I didn’t execute perfectly and some things didn’t break out way. Sometimes when you try too hard in baseball, it can backfire on you, and we’ve got to be careful about that, too. As I talked about over the last several weeks, all of us getting back to an approach that works well for us. I’m going to have to be careful to trust our well-studied and long-standing beliefs on the best way to run this team.

“Clearly after this disappointing exit, we’re all going to feel a lot of urgency to not have this be the case next year. But what I’m saying is, I’m going to have to be smart about how to make that happen.”