The Orioles entered 2024 with World Series aspirations. By payroll, though, they barely gave themselves a chance.

Over the past three decades, no team has won a World Series after opening the season bottom five in payroll. The Orioles were 26th out of 30 MLB teams, ranking in the bottom five for the sixth straight season. Only three of the past 30 champions have done so while ranking outside the top half in spending.

This year’s Fall Classic between the deep-pocketed New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers isn’t proof that spending $250 million a year is the only way to win the World Series. But it does show that behaving competitively on the basis of payroll is essentially a requirement to win a championship.

In an interview with NPR earlier this month, Orioles owner David Rubenstein, 75, said he wants to “speed up the effort to get a World Series” because of his age. This offseason will be his first since officially purchasing the team in March.

“Well, success means you win a championship,” he said when asked how he defines success. “Everybody wants to win a championship. … I recognize it takes some time before you kind of get to a World Series. But clearly, without winning a World Series or a championship, it won’t be satisfying. So I’m trying to do everything I can with my partners to make sure that the team has everything it needs to win a championship. It may take time. Some people own teams for 10 or 15 or 20 years and don’t win a World Series.

“So I have to recognize that it may not happen. I’m now 75 years old. It’s unlikely that I’ll be, you know, doing this for 20 more years. So I’ve got to speed up the effort to get a World Series a lot sooner than maybe some younger owners would.”

The Yankees entered the season ranked second in payroll at $303.3 million, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts. The Dodgers were third at $249.8 million. The Orioles’ was a relatively puny $95.3 million.

The World Series, which Los Angeles leads 2-0 ahead of Game 3 on Monday night, features the sport’s biggest stars who were signed to massive contracts. Dodgers slugger Shohei Ohtani signed a unique $700 million contract this past offseason. Yankees masher Aaron Judge signed for $360 million two offseasons ago.

Both teams’ No. 1 starting pitchers — New York’s Gerrit Cole and Los Angeles’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto — were signed for north of $320 million. Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton, perhaps the best hitter this October, has a $325 million contract. Dodgers star Mookie Betts signed an extension — the type of contract Baltimore fans hope the Orioles give to Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and others — for $365 million in 2020.

It is not realistic — nor is anyone expecting — for the small-market Orioles to run a $300 million payroll or sign several players to nine-figure contracts, and spending money does not guarantee on-field success. But it is imperative the Orioles, who haven’t signed a free agent to a multiyear major league contract since general manager Mike Elias took over, earnestly engage in the market to address their needs in the rotation, bullpen and lineup.

Elias will enter this offseason with what appears to be his first real chance to markedly improve his roster via free agency, and he said during his end-of-season news conference that he hopes to do just that.

“I could dance around that because it’s early, and I don’t think it’s really fair before I get into my planning,” Elias said when asked if he hopes payroll will be higher in 2025. “But, yeah, I would be pretty confident that we’re going to keep investing in the major league payroll given what we’ve got here and the upward slope that we hope to get back on. We’ll see what happens. We’re going to be smart about it. And if it doesn’t happen for some reason, it’s not going to be because the financial support wasn’t there. It’s going to be because the people running this team thought it was the right thing to do from a number of levels on a case-by-case basis. But I want to reiterate that I don’t expect that to be the case.”

When Elias took over the Orioles after the 2018 season, he was tasked with overhauling one of the most broken operations in baseball. From drafting and developing to analytics to the international market, the Orioles were not competitive with the top organizations in baseball.

Six years since Elias was hired, Baltimore is now seen as one of the top outfits in those departments — and success on the big league field has followed. But the results in October haven’t with back-to-back postseasons ending in sweeps.

The Orioles’ strengths likely won’t result in a title until they’re married with a competitive payroll. Perhaps that will finally happen this offseason.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer@baltsun.com, 667-942-3337 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.