Remember the euphoria that greeted the Orioles’ return to Baltimore 12 months ago?

In 2023, they had shocked the baseball world and delighted their long-suffering fans by winning 101 games and the AL East. Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson were the fresh faces of a revolution, with No. 1 prospect Jackson Holliday soon to join them from the fecund farm system built by acclaimed general manager Mike Elias. That youth movement would be fortified by Corbin Burnes, the finest starting pitcher to don an Orioles uniform since Hall of Fame right-hander Mike Mussina.

To top it off, charming billionaire David Rubenstein had finally pried the franchise from the Angelos family, with promises to invest in bringing a World Series championship back to his hometown.

It was Baltimore’s most optimistic baseball spring since the Orioles’ glory days more than three decades earlier.

But as the club — largely led by the same players — prepares to begin its 2025 chapter Thursday in Toronto, the vibes are less assured.

It’s not that the Orioles fell on their faces last season or that any of their sparkling young talents went bust. It’s just that they failed to leap forward for the first time in this run. A meek exit from the postseason flowed into an offseason devoid of thrilling player additions.

So here we are, wondering where this whole thing is going as we reach Year 42 in this town’s World Series drought.

Elias has seen it before. When he was apprenticing in the Houston front office, the Astros shocked prognosticators by making the 2015 playoffs, but then they needed an 84-win consolidation season in 2016 before taking the quantum leap to become baseball’s dominant franchise from 2017 to 2022.

Even expertly designed growth is not always linear in a sport in which pitching elbows explode and top prospects hit abrupt developmental ruts.

Plenty went right for the Orioles in 2024.

Henderson leaped from American League Rookie of the Year to Most Valuable Player candidate. Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser evolved from prospects to above-average regulars. They looked like the best team in baseball through three months and won more than 90 games for the second consecutive year (something no Orioles club had done since 1983). They pitched well enough to win a wild-card series against the Kansas City Royals in which their bats never awoke.

Plenty also went wrong.

Starter Kyle Bradish needed Tommy John elbow reconstruction just as he started pitching like a true No. 1. Rutschman, the young leader of this Baltimore baseball renaissance, hit .207 with three home runs in the second half of the season for reasons we still don’t truly understand. Holliday could not translate his minor league precocity to major league performance. After peaking with a 17-5 demolition of the New York Yankees on June 20, the Orioles went 42-46 the rest of the regular season. Then, they were swept out of the postseason for the second consecutive year.

Their 2023 divisional series loss to the scorching Texas Rangers did nothing to dim the optimism around this prospect-fueled rocket ship that seemed to be launching from Camden Yards.

But last fall was different. For the first time, it felt fair to call this version of the Orioles a disappointment. Fan belief in Elias and manager Brandon Hyde was no longer a given.

Elias, while still “bullish” on the club’s big picture, acknowledged the tonal shift at his end-of-season news conference. “The expectations from this season were different,” he said. “We didn’t meet them. We all feel that. And it has applied a different kind of pressure that is new for a lot of people in this building.”

Those comments set up what felt like a crucial offseason in which Rubenstein’s willingness to spend would be tested for the first time.

The results were mixed at best.

The Orioles increased their payroll. They built out their pitching depth, signing longtime Japanese ace Tomoyuki Sugano, ageless Charlie Morton and consistent reliever Andrew Kittredge. They added a coveted right-handed thumper in outfielder Tyler O’Neill.

All these deals were sensible in isolation.

In the aggregate, they left fans and analysts wondering if the Orioles were watching the train go by.

Burnes said they were “pretty aggressive” in trying to re-sign him, just not aggressive enough to overcome his desire to be close to his Arizona home.

Meanwhile, the Yankees signed left-hander Max Fried to a massive deal. The Boston Red Sox traded some of their prospect bounty for Garrett Crochet, who struck out 209 batters in 146 innings last year.

The Orioles’ approach is defensible. They would have had to break the $200 million barrier to bid seriously on Burnes or Fried, neither of whom is likely to return consistent value over the next six and eight years, respectively. The Chicago White Sox might have demanded power-hitting phenom Samuel Basallo as compensation for Crochet, who has no track record of consistency.

But the upshot for 2025 is that their chief AL East rivals added No. 1 starters while the Orioles waved goodbye to theirs, a loss that only stings worse now that Grayson Rodriguez is starting the season on the injured list with inflammation in his throwing elbow.

They hoped the back of their bullpen would be more stable with “The Mountain,” Félix Bautista, again hurling his thunderbolts from on high. But Bautista’s velocity was down a few ticks this spring, and he wasn’t certain to make the opening roster until a few days ago. To make matters worse, Kittredge is on the injured list after unanticipated surgery to his left knee.

As for their offense, the Orioles took no major steps to change the boom-or-bust style that has worked brilliantly at times but has failed them in the playoffs.

O’Neill mashes against lefties but has struggled to stay on the field and brings a career .322 on-base percentage. That’s better than the guy he’s replacing, Anthony Santander, but Santander’s power carried the Baltimore lineup through stretches of last summer.

Again, the Orioles were prudent not to match the five-year deal, $92 million deal Santander got from the Toronto Blue Jays. But when “prudent” is the defining adjective to sum up your offseason, it’s not exactly cause to bust out the orange and black streamers.

Now that the real season is upon us, we can say confidently that the Orioles are trying to patch together a rotation and bullpen while counting on the continued development of their young offensive core: Henderson, Rutschman, Holliday, Westburg, Cowser, Heston Kjerstad and at some point, Basallo and Coby Mayo.

It’s not the worst plan.

There are reasons those guys filled out the upper reaches of prospect lists over the past five years. There are reasons why power rankings, projection systems and the Las Vegas odds agree that the Orioles remain a serious contender going into 2025.

If a front office has to bet big on one thing, a gifted, cheap bounty of position players is the right choice.

But patience isn’t automatically a virtue, and if the Orioles don’t step forward this season in an AL ripe for the taking, their relative passivity over the past five months will become a major talking point.

Have a news tip? Contact Childs Walker at daviwalker@baltsun.com, 410-332-6893 and x.com/ChildsWalker.