Only in the last few weeks of the offseason have the Orioles made any kind of meaningful additions to their club for 2021, with Freddy Galvis signed as the starting shortstop and veterans Félix Hernández and Wade LeBlanc brought in as rotation depth.

But another late-offseason development — the trade of Alex Cobb, with the Orioles covering a majority of his salary while he pitches for the Los Angeles Angels — was more in line with the prevailing view of their winter.

The Orioles’ long-stated goals of trying to amass young talent and turn major league assets into younger, longer-term talents also accomplishes a goal of lowering the team’s payroll bit by bit, and the perception is the Orioles on and off the field have tried to cut costs at every turn ahead of this 2021 season.

José Iglesias was due to make $3.5 million as the starting shortstop before he was traded to the Angels. Infielders Hanser Alberto and Renato Núñez were let go before the contract tender deadline when their 2021 salaries might have been around that $3.5 million combined. And now the Orioles traded Cobb to save a reported $5 million of the $15 million they would have owed him.

In the cases of trading Iglesias and Cobb, the Orioles got players they like in return, highlighted by a near major league ready piece in infielder/outfielder Jahmai Jones and right-hander Garrett Stallings. But with the Orioles’ major league payroll set to be among the lowest in the league, executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said there’s still plenty of resources for the team to execute what it has long sought to do in terms of building a long-term contender at Camden Yards.

“Since I’ve been here, we have had the support and we have done and are doing everything we want to do to update the

organizational infrastructure and to add young talent to the system and to sign amateur talent and execute the rebuilding strategy that we’re going to need,” Elias said.

“Obviously, we’ve got to adhere to real-world economic challenges that present with what’s going on in 2020, but also being in the market that we’re in, and the part of the cycle that we’re in and the attendance cycle that we’re in, and the era of roster construction that we’re coming off of and still emerging from, but we have been able to and will be able to do everything that we need to do get this thing back up on its feet. When we need to invest much more than we’re doing right now in major league salary, and were to push our chances of making the playoffs, we’re going to be equipped to do that.”

The Orioles’ payroll for players currently on their roster is estimated around $48.5 million, though some of Chris Davis’ $23 million salary is deferred. The last year of his contract in 2022 is the only guaranteed money the team has on the books beyond this season.

The resulting roster is likely to be on course for 100 or more losses, even with a strong core including John Means, Trey Mancini and Anthony Santander, possible contributions from rookies such as Ryan Mountcastle, Dean Kremer and Keegan Akin already on the roster and Jones and Yusniel Diaz as possibilities to join the club this season.

The hope will be that the Orioles’ investments elsewhere prove worth it. The payroll has been cut by over $100 million from its peak of over $167 million in 2017, but the Orioles didn’t use their allotment of over $5 million they could have spent on international amateur free agents. With the 21st pick in the draft that year, their bonus pool was $6.8 million to sign their top picks.

In 2019, the last full 162-game season, the Orioles ended up spending around $5 million on their first major international signing bonus class and a shade under $15 million on their draft class led by No. 1 overall pick Adley Rutschman. Though bonuses were deferred in 2020 after an initial $100,000 payment, their six-player draft class signed for $13.6 million in bonuses, and the delayed 2020 international class cost over $5 million when finalized last month.

Spending $10 million or so more per year on amateur signings doesn’t account for any of the Orioles’ cost-cutting measures, from The Athletic’s report that the team tried to get Mancini and Santander to defer their arbitration salaries to the cuts in the broadcast teams.

It does, however, represent a much more significant chance of providing meaningful value to the organization than putting that $10 million into major league payroll, even if it might have made for more pleasant nights in front of television sets for Orioles fans before they’re allowed back into the ballpark.

Same goes for the costs incurred to beef up the international scouting and analytics staffs, all of which could deliver more return on that investment by hitting on one star-level player than $10 million in papering over cracks in a team that’s not ready to compete could.

There are plenty of organizations who can field competitive teams year-in and year-out while still investing as much as possible into player development and signing amateur talent. Perhaps the Orioles will join that group again in due time.

In the interim, the Orioles’ priority is going to be the future — unpleasant as that might make the present.