In an offseason poll conducted by The Athletic, Baltimore Orioles fans were asked when they expected the team to return to contention in the American League East.

The joke answer, "The year after I die," finished fourth, selected by 13.1% of respondents. It was sandwiched between 2023 (16%) and 2026 (5.6%).

The most popular answer tabbed the Orioles as three years away from contention (2024, 45.7%). Only 0.5% of respondents selected 2022.

MLB

As Orioles see returns on young stars, GM plans for offseason

Pessimism was understandable coming off a season of 110 losses – Baltimore's third 100-loss season in four years. From 2017-21, the Orioles lost an MLB-high 450 games, 25 more than the next-worst club, the Detroit Tigers. Baltimore's winning percentage in those four seasons was .326, barely above the statistical definition of replacement level (.320).

Projection systems and pundits also were down on the O's, selecting the team for another last-place finish. ESPN predicted that if everything went right, the Orioles would win 70 games in 2022.

But something unexpected happened this summer: The Orioles are playing meaningful baseball.

Last Wednesday night in Cleveland, as the pregame rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" reached its final stanza, a surprisingly large contingent of traveling Orioles fans belted out a collective "O!" The one-syllable emphasis is a Baltimore tradition for the anthem, which was written by Maryland's own Francis Scott Key after observing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814.

An hour-and-a-half after the first pitch, Gunnar Henderson, at the plate for the second time in his first major-league game, smashed a pivotal home run over the right-center fence. His first MLB hit propelled the Orioles to their 68th win of the year. Henderson, 21, is the third top-rated, homegrown position-player prospect developed by the new management regime who's reached the majors this year.

Rutschman, 24, was Baseball America's No. 1 overall prospect in the preseason, and Henderson was its No. 1 prospect at the time of his callup. Baltimore's top three picks from the 2019 draft – Rustchman, Henderson, and Kyle Stowers, 24 – have all reached the majors this year.

If the Orioles' .529 winning percentage holds through the end of the season, they'll enjoy the fourth-greatest turnaround among AL and NL teams since 1920, trailing only the 1999 Arizona Diamondbacks, 1946 Boston Red Sox, and the 1936 Boston Braves. It would eclipse Baltimore's last great rebound between 1988 and 1989, when it was the last of four clubs on that list to increase their winning percentage by 20 percentage points from one season to the next.

Orioles general manager Mike Elias, who started in the role just before Thanksgiving 2018, told theScore last week that their rebuild project is "on a scale that hadn't been seen since the Astros' one in 2012."

The northern Virginia native would know. He came from Houston, where he served as amateur scouting director and later as assistant GM between 2011 and 2018. The Astros, then widely dubbed the "Disastros," had their first winning season under former GM Jeffrey Luhnow in 2015, the fourth full year of that rebuild. The Orioles are on track to do the same in their fourth year under Elias. In year six, the Astros won the World Series, albeit a title now tainted by a sign-stealing scandal that cost Luhnow his job.

Just how did the Orioles accelerate such a massive rebuild?