Rebuilding was always going to be tough to judge along the way

The rebuilding of a baseball team - in this case, the Orioles - can be extremely hard to judge along the way. In the end, probably years from now, it will be easier to look back and see if executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias and his staff made more right moves along the way.

The rebuild's success or ultimate failure will be easier to judge in a long view looking backward.

Did they win enough to produce a contending team, one built to contend over many years, not just one or two? Did they win division titles? Did they win the World Series? The 1983 team is well in the past.

From 2012 to 2016, the Orioles won a division title, played for the American League championship, made the playoffs three times and led the AL in wins over that five-year span. That was a nice run of success. But if winning the World Series for you, the fan, determines success or failure, that group won a lot of games, but never got there.

The current Orioles, in the extremely rough and tumble AL East, could make big improvement and still be the fifth-best team in the division. That is indeed daunting.

Recently, a gentleman wrote me an old-school letter. He mailed it to the MASN offices and they forwarded it to me. He expressed frustration with the speed of this rebuild and felt the mounting losses since 2018 have hurt attendance. No doubt he is right, but it's not like there was some quick fix and solution.

Whether this rebuild works or not, we can't say the Orioles have no direction or plan. They are rebuilding from the ground up, using three top five draft picks, with one more coming, with an overhauled player development system. The entire organization now features many younger coaches that easily talk analytics, technology and data. They attack the process of building a player differently than Earl Weaver and George Bamberger did in their day.

The game has changed and most of the top organizations rely heavily now on analytics and a big effort in the international amateur market. Now the Orioles are on board with that.

I have said before that if fans are grading the Elias regime and its rebuild based on the current won-loss record, they are doing it wrong.

The Orioles have lost 100 games or more five times in club history and they have done that in two of two full seasons under Elias. So that record is not good. But we knew it would not be and moves he made for the 2019 through 2021 seasons at the big league level are not the type of moves he can be expected to make when the team is better and has a chance to play .500 or better baseball.

He has stated the goal is to build a long-term winner and not a one- or two-season flash in the pan. This time, maybe the winning run, if he can pull it off, will last longer than five years.

The minor league organization is now ranked No. 1 by MLBPipeline.com and No. 2 by Baseball America. The high draft picks helped and soon this organization should be producing more top 100 international talent. But the Orioles need to prove they can consistently develop young pitchers and this, as any club could tell you, is most difficult to do.

The Orioles have a clear direction, but we don't know if they will have a near future featuring a lot of winning. There are no guarantees here. But for my friend who wrote that letter, there was also was no shortcut to produce more wins and better attendance sooner. They could have thrown money at their problems, but it sure seems the better way is what they are trying to do.

But even as it seems better days are ahead, fans can get frustrated as they see wins in the present mount. While at the same time, it is hard to judge the rebuilding or project how the future might be different from the baseball we've seen the last several years. Rebuilding was always going to be hard and always easier to judge years down the road better than in the early or middle stages of the process.