When the Orioles take the field Thursday in Toronto, it will perhaps be the strongest the organization has been for an opening day in decades.

The Orioles are forecast by the most popular projections system to win the American League East. The franchise is no longer hamstrung with litigation against its crosstown rival over the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network arrangement. The ballclub has a billionaire owner who put his money where his mouth was over the offseason.

Despite those facts, many Baltimore fans aren’t as optimistic about the team’s future after ace Corbin Burnes and slugger Anthony Santander left this offseason and superstars Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman are barreling down the path toward free agency later this decade.

In each of the first six seasons under executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias, the club had a clear direction, first with the rebuild and then with the transition toward contending the past two seasons. Entering this year, the Orioles are seemingly at a crossroads, and the answer to whether they take a step forward or a backward in 2025 begins Thursday.

“Our goal is to go as far as we can and win a World Series. That’s the ultimate goal,” Rutschman said. “A challenging season ahead, and I have all the faith in the world in our guys.”

Zach Eflin will take the ball first for the Orioles. While not a bona fide ace, Eflin is a capable No. 1 starting pitcher, one who likely wouldn’t be in Baltimore if not for owner David Rubenstein. At last season’s trade deadline, Rubenstein was willing to take on the right-hander’s $18 million salary for 2025 after years of former Orioles CEO and Chairman John Angelos’ frugality.

In addition to signing Eflin’s checks, Rubenstein authorized eight major league contracts that Elias handed out this offseason. Those eight players — Tyler O’Neill, Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano, Andrew Kittredge, Gary Sánchez, Kyle Gibson, Ramón Laureano and Dylan Carlson — added a combined $73.25 million to the club’s 2025 payroll. That amounts to a whopping 76.9% increase over last year’s payroll, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, making it the largest percentage uptick for any MLB team.

“I think the new ownership group being plugged in has really put us in a position now and going forward where we’re going to be able to operate the baseball side of the franchise in a very intelligent way,” Elias said. “That’s our goal — keep this organization strong, healthy, competitive, playoff-caliber baseball.”

At $164.8 million, the Orioles’ payroll ranks 15th out of 30 MLB teams after opening each of the first six years of the Elias era in the bottom five. Rubenstein expressed in February, during his first official news conference since purchasing the club last March, that he isn’t worried about how much money Elias doles out.

“I don’t have a financial limit,” the 75-year-old Baltimore native said.

However, Rubenstein later said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun that he still wants to “make a profit.” Multiple times this offseason, the private equity billionaire also came out in favor of a salary cap in MLB, a proposal that would almost certainly cause a work stoppage in the future and, if implemented, suppress players’ wages.

While the Orioles’ payroll took a sizable jump, they did so without making a splash in the offseason. All but one of the eight players they signed agreed to one-year contracts, meaning there’s no guarantee Baltimore’s payroll will continue on this upward trajectory.

Josh Sroka, a lifelong Baltimore fan who co-hosts the “Section 336” podcast about the Orioles, said he isn’t as concerned as others in the fan base, but “signing a big name would’ve been fun.”

One of those big names was Burnes, who left to join the Diamondbacks for $210 million and to be at home with his growing family in Arizona. Instead of acquiring an ace, Elias bolstered his starting pitching depth by bringing in veterans Morton, Sugano and Gibson, but none of those arms are in the same stratosphere as Burnes, who was the Orioles’ first legitimate ace since Mike Mussina.

Xavier Scruggs, a former big leaguer who is now an analyst for “Friday Night Baseball” on Apple TV+, said any team with World Series aspirations “absolutely” needs to have an ace atop its rotation.

“It’s hard to expect to be a deep postseason team without the caliber of a guy like Corbin Burnes,” Scruggs said. “If you’re a fan and you look at the teams that ultimately win the World Series, you’re upset, and rightfully so, that you weren’t able to get an ace this offseason.”

Elias doesn’t see it that way.

“No, it’s not necessary,” he said. “The important thing for us is putting together a team that projects as playoff-caliber, championship-caliber, and that can come in different shapes and sizes.”

World Series hopefuls also might not always need 40-homer sluggers, but the Orioles lost one of those this offseason, too, and they’ll have to face him Thursday. Santander signed for $92.5 million with the Blue Jays after the Orioles’ contract offer to him “wasn’t even close.”

“Nah, zero chance,” he said this spring when asked if he considered signing it. “Zero chance at all.”

Sroka isn’t feeling angst because Elias’ offseason lacked pizazz. The 45-year-old Arnold native and other Baltimore fans are worried about Henderson and Rutschman and the club’s other young stars leaving when they hit free agency.

“What I want to see more than bringing in a star is I want to see Gunnar locked up long term, I want to see Adley get extended,” Sroka said. “Let’s open this window up and make it a little bigger.”

While the futures of Henderson and Rutschman will remain a concern among some in the fan base until they’re signed long term, it’s not pertinent to the success of the 2025 club, and many signs point to the Orioles once again having a successful team.

Armed with one of the oldest rotations in MLB ironically combined with one of the sport’s best young cores, the Orioles have the third best World Series odds in the AL, according to Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA projections. However, it won’t be easy in the AL East, considered once again the most competitive division in baseball.

“The other four teams are really, really good teams,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “It’s going to be a dog fight.”

Hyde said this is the “most experienced” team he’s had since he began as Orioles manager in 2019. While Henderson, Rutschman, Grayson Rodriguez, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser and others have established themselves in the big leagues, Hyde believes those players have even more to prove, on top of youngsters such as Jackson Holliday, who is hoping to bounce back from a disappointing rookie campaign.

“We’re not young anymore, but we still have guys that still haven’t reached their upside,” Hyde said.

There are early season hurdles, though. Henderson and Rodriguez are both out to begin the year. The former is only expected to miss the first week, while the latter could be out at least a month.

Another winning season would be Baltimore’s fourth straight, which would be the franchise’s longest such streak since the early 1980s. However, whether this season is a success or failure will come down to how the club performs in October. The Orioles have lost 10 straight playoff games since 2014, tied for the fourth longest streak in MLB history.

Despite leading the AL in wins across the past two seasons, both ended in a thud in October with early sweeps. The Orioles believe they have the team this year to get back there and exorcise their playoff demons.

“We’re trying to win baseball games,” Westburg said while listing off the team’s goals, “get back to the postseason and finish what we haven’t been able to the last couple years.”

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.