Paul Fry knows this Orioles team is growing older simply because of the amount of children around the locker room.
Baltimore is in the second year of a multi-year rebuild. While its players are starting their lives professionally, they’re starting them personally, too, with first-time dads across the locker room.
General manager and executive vice president Mike Elias added that the nursery at Camden Yards was a bit busier than usual last season.
The Orioles had the third-youngest roster for batters and the sixth-youngest for pitchers last season, and with another year in the rebuild for 2020, not much will be different.
But depending on who you ask, that’s not exactly a bad thing.
“In a way, it feels like we’re all kind of growing up together,” Fry, a relief pitcher, said. “We have a lot of babies now, there’s a bunch of babies in the clubhouse. We’re all growing together, we’re all learning together, we’re all going through our struggles and stuff together. It’s a pretty cool dynamic together.”
With so much youth across the roster exists opportunity, however, which means the Orioles can off positions other teams across the league just can’t.
“As the season went along, really the theme last year was opportunity,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “A lot of these guys that we had hadn’t had a whole lot of major league service time. It’s going to be a little bit similar this year also, we’re still going to have an inexperienced group. But we are going to have guys that have some more experience than we did last year. I’m looking for those type of guys to take the next step in their careers.”
Some of those names are the familiar ones: Austin Hays, Ryan Mountcastle and Hunter Harvey.
Others, though, are in a spot waiting to prove themselves worthy of a major league roster spot.
“We’re all just waiting to break out,” Fry said. “It’s one of those things where someone is going to step up, someone’s going to be that next guy. We’re all waiting to find ourselves.”
The Orioles will continue to be infused with young talent as the year moves on, too, as a second-overall pick will be added into the fold come June.
Baltimore’s farm system already has one of the best prospects in baseball in Adley Rutschman and, according to mlb.com, four of the top 100 prospects in the entire sport.
“I like where we’re at and the trajectory that we’re on, I feel good at the level of talent that we have,” Elias said. “I think we have a top 10 farm system now, we’ve got another high draft pick in a couple of months, we’ve got our international program up and running finally and a lot of the guys that are here on the major league camp roster here in Sarasota look to me like they’re taking steps forward.”
The Orioles aren’t going to be competitive in 2020 and will almost assuredly be in the same position next year — with a young roster full of hopefuls and a top pick upcoming in June.
But for this season, there will be chances aplenty to seize roster spots for not only this season, but for the future too.
“We’ve got a lot of good, young talent,” Harvey said. “The last few years have been tough for this organization but there’s a lot of bright stuff coming. It’s a process, it’s slow — which it’s not very fun when you’ve got to wait for good seasons — but I think it’s going to get here faster than anyone thinks.”
In the meantime, though, while the losing will persist, that doesn’t mean there won’t be some fun in Baltimore.
“We have a great vibe in the clubhouse, we did last year,” pitcher John Means said. “You wouldn’t really realize how much we were losing by just walking in the clubhouse and I think that’s very very important. Obviously we’re going to make mistakes, we’re a very young team, a lot of us weren’t even very high draft picks and we’re out here getting an opportunity at the highest stage. We might as well have fun with it, we might as well enjoy it.”
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