SARASOTA, Fla. - The reprogramming of baseball’s former No. 1 prospect easily fits as one of the most interesting developments in Orioles camp.

There’s no need to go over Jackson Holliday’s numbers again in 2024. They weren’t good. He was a 20 year old tackling the challenges that the majors present. Expectations shot through the roof, and that’s Holliday’s fault for being such an exceptional young talent.

“I think that when you’re 20 years old and you get to the big leagues, the hype that you get, and you put up the minor league numbers that you do, people are expecting you to do the same thing when you get to the big leagues,” said manager Brandon Hyde. “And a lot of times that’s just unrealistic.”

Holliday replaced the leg lift timing mechanism with a toe tap and went 7-for-18 to close out September. The Orioles had specific instructions for him after the season – focus on reaching base and being disruptive. Bunt more, run more, be aggressive. The club would reel him in if necessary.

The former first-overall draft pick is 3-for-5 in stolen base attempts after swiping second base during Sunday afternoon’s game against the Twins. He was instrumental in an inning that Hyde described later as his favorite of the spring, with three runs manufactured in small-ball fashion. Putting the ball in play with runners in scoring position and with shortened swings, and creating flashbacks to 2023.

Under the Mike Elias regime, Matt Blood has played a prominent role for the Orioles. He was hired first as director of player development in September of 2019. On his watch, the O’s farm system became the first to be ranked No. 1 in five straight rankings by MLBPipeline.com. 

Blood was promoted to his current role, vice president, player development and domestic scouting in October of 2023.

He was involved in the recent hiring of Triple-A Norfolk manager Tim Federowicz, someone he knows since both were students and involved with the baseball team at the University of North Carolina.

When Buck Britton was hired to move to the O’s big league coaching staff, the club interviewed several candidates for their Triple-A opening before the recent hiring of Federowicz.

Federowicz had a 13-year pro career and played parts of eight season in the majors as a catcher with six teams. He retired in December of 2021.

Another year - the third here at MASNSports.com - of producing a top-20 list attempting to rank Orioles international prospects has come and gone. It’s an exercise that takes some time and some help. The first one I need to take care of myself and the second one I get from some nice people around baseball.

This list of 20 this year was quite strong, and now the O’s have a shining example of what an international signing can turn into with catcher Samuel Basallo at age 19 becoming the No. 10 prospect in baseball per Baseball America.

Again this year, this ranking helped hammer home how far the O’s international program has come.

It produced these other takeaways for me:

The top 30 rankings: The international players are really breaking through now in the team top-30 prospect rankings. When I did the top 20 last year the O’s had five international prospects in the Baseball America top 30, and now they have eight. It would be nine had they not traded César Prieto to St. Louis, where he ranks No. 17 in the Cardinals’ top 30.

Today, as we continue to rollout the MASNSports.com top 20 O’s international prospects, we find out yet again that teams can get big talents sometimes out of modest signing bonuses.

Some players sign late in the process as late bloomers and beyond that, it is just hard to project what someone at age 16 will look like and play like three, four, and six years down the road.

It is also quite exciting to see a pitcher ranked so highly now on this list as left-hander Luis De León, age 20, is the No. 2 prospect on the list for 2024.

He was signed by the club for just $30,000 in December of 2021 out of Barahona, Dominican Republic. He had an ERA of 5.14 in 28 innings in 2022 in the Dominican Summer League.

But last year, over six games in the rookie-level Florida Complex League and 10 for Single-A Delmarva, he went a combined 5-1 with a 2.01 ERA in 53 2/3 innings. It was a nice breakout performance by the lefty. Even after he moved up, he allowed just a .177 batting average and 2.39 ERA in his first go-around in full-season ball with the Shorebirds. De León walked 30 with 67 strikeouts (11.2 K per 9) and had a 1.30 WHIP. Among all O’s farm pitchers with 50 or more innings last season, his ERA was second-best.

The Orioles continue to see strong signs that their international program is really starting to hum. As they get set to open a brand-new Dominican complex, in recent weeks they had four international players ranked among the top prospects in the Florida Complex League. They had seven players taken in September in the Dominican Winter League draft, led by catching prospect Samuel Basallo.

Basallo is the shining star right now among the O’s international talent, but is far from the only talent starting to get noticed.

“In recent years we planted some seeds and the flowers are starting to come up,” said the O’s Koby Perez, promoted recently from senior director of international scouting to vice president of international scouting and operations. “Our staff and scouts on the ground have done a fantastic job finding talent and I can’t say enough about our player development system. Some of the fruits of our labor are starting to show.”

Perez and the Orioles will unveil a new international signing class when the signing date arrives on Jan. 15.

“We feel good about this upcoming class,” Perez told me at the Winter Meetings in Nashville. “We feel like we’re going to have a couple of players that are publicly ranked in the signing class. And there are other guys, maybe not publicly ranked, but that we value highly as we have in the past. We’re excited and can’t wait to Jan. 15 to get these guys under wraps.”

The Orioles had a strong showing recently when Baseball America presented its top 20 prospects for this season from the Rookie-level Florida Complex League.

The Birds had four players represented in the back half of the list. And they are all international signings, another sign that the club’s international program is really starting to get going right now.

Three of the four players were signed for significant bonuses in January 2022 and those investments seem to be paying off.

The New York Yankees had the strongest showing in this ranking, with five players among the top 20 and four in the top 10. But no other team besides the O’s had as many as four players ranked.

Dominican outfielder Braylin Tavera, 18, was rated No. 12 on the FCL list. The club signed Tavera in January 2022 for $1.7 million, the second-highest bonus the Orioles have handed out under the Mike Elias regime.