This is going to feel rich coming from the guy who published his therapy homework to try and make sense of the Orioles’ early-season freefall, but here goes:

The end of 2025 has felt so fresh and so distinctive from everything that came before it that maybe, just maybe, that terrible season was worth something.

Since it ended the Orioles have made two major trades, for outfielder Taylor Ward and starter Shane Baz, added slugger Pete Alonso, closer Ryan Helsley, and starter Zach Eflin in free agency, and picked a manager in Craig Albernaz who seems like the real deal and can help get this club back on track.

It feels overly simplistic to say that none of this would have happened had 2025 not gone so badly. What’s maybe not as simple but just as true is the idea that as president of baseball operations Mike Elias said, you have to evolve and adapt in this game, and something fundamentally changed with the Orioles through all that was lost in 2025.

And let’s be clear: Plenty was lost. Games, most of all, but beyond that a sense of belief in this ground-up project that Elias and his team started back in 2018. In a way, progress was lost, as so many of the inroads the Orioles made with their fans after years of bad baseball eroded. Jobs were lost, too. A good baseball man in Brandon Hyde and several of his longtime staffers aren’t here anymore because of it.

The losing never really stopped either. It was ominous early when they lost Grayson Rodriguez to spring training elbow soreness and Gunnar Henderson missed the beginning of the year with a rib injury, and so many others lost part or all of their seasons to injury as well. When Hyde lost his job, Elias pledged self-reflection and reevaluation of everything the Orioles do.

To take the last two months as evidence, the outcome of those inquests was that the Orioles needed to change how they do business.

Even if, as they insist and I believe, the way the offseason leading up to last season included more ambitious pursuits that failed (like trying to sign Corbin Burnes longterm) and led to them pivoting to lower-cost, shorter-term solutions that didn’t really work out (Tyler O’Neill, Tomoyuki Sugano), risking that happening again would have been to the compound catastrophe.

So, two things have changed, at least to me.

One is they’re being more realistic about the players they have in-house, and that’s shown up in a couple of ways.

1. The first is obvious: If you don’t know that you can count on Grayson Rodriguez for anything, you might as well try to use him to acquire someone consistent like Ward you can count on.
2. But also, instead of hoping that your homegrown players can return to being the mashers in the heart of the lineup or a prospect like Coby Mayo can one day turn into Alonso, you just go sign the genuine article.

I’d argue neither of those things — trading away a true talent with the ability to contribute for years to come, or signing a superstar free agent to block a well-regarded homegrown player — would have happened like this without the lessons of 2025.

Similarly, neither would their aggression and insistence on getting what they wanted. The Rodriguez-for-Ward trade allowed them to jump the outfield market and make an upgrade they wanted without waiting for the market to come to them. Helsley was someone the Orioles have coveted for years, and because he was the first closer to sign with a new team, they seem to have gotten a good deal for him.

Alonso’s signing came after the chastening pursuit of Kyle Schwarber, and the Orioles didn’t waste any time in pivoting and bringing in the marquee hitting acquisition of the offseason to this point. With the starting pitching market slow to develop in free agency, the risk of waiting for a handful of players who could easily sign elsewhere was real; trading for Baz gave them a high-upside safety net for their rotation upgrade searches, and bringing Eflin back gives a sense that they understand that even their depth has to be high-quality this time around.

Sure, some of this might have happened even if 2025 had gone well. The Blue Jays’ season went well — they were inches away from a World Series title — and they’ve still gone out and spent big this winter. Plenty of teams push to make competitive rosters championship-caliber, and the free agency lessons the Orioles learned last year would be applicable this winter whether the Orioles won 75 or 95 games.

We know that they only won 75, and that very little about it felt good. And we know what has happened since. It’s going to be hard to convince anyone that it’s not all related, though I’m not sure why anyone would want to. There’s no shame in doing what the Orioles have done — spending money on big-time free agents and trading young players for win-now talent. If they end up winning a championship because of it, those parade floats will still be filled with Elias-era draft picks who form the core of the team.

And if anything good happens to this team the rest of this decade, it won’t excuse how badly 2025 went. It might ultimately make the collapse feel worse, considering it took a year away from this group’s time here.

Anything good will most certainly be because of it, though. That much feels like a near certainty. Because a year that very much felt like the end of something now feels like the start of something new, and maybe better. We’ll never forget the fire that charred everything, but the new growth emerging now looks promising.