A decade ago, under different management and different ownership, the Orioles’ offseason pitching pursuits would follow a familiar pattern: Wait until the rest of the league scooped up the top pitchers available and sign whoever was left in February or March.

That’s how Ubaldo Jimenez, Yovani Gallardo, Andrew Cashner and Alex Cobb ended up with the Orioles. Some of those signings went better than others, but none went particularly well.

This year’s glacial starting pitching market isn’t shaping up like one in which president of baseball operations Mike Elias will be stuck with whoever the rest of the league rejects, but the dwindling options are putting the Orioles in a spot they’d probably prefer not to be in.

Their offseason has been one of the league’s best. They replaced Grayson Rodriguez’s uncertain contribution to the rotation with Shane Baz and brought back Zach Eflin, but they feel a starting pitcher light as spring training approaches.

What they do about that is going to answer a lot of questions about their true comfort level in paying market rate for starting pitching and just how close they feel their pitching staff is to competing with the best this league has to offer.

The part that brings me back to offseasons of yore is that, in each of those, the Orioles’ eventual free agent acquisition became plainly obvious once other pitchers signed elsewhere. That’s kind of what’s happening with left-hander Framber Valdez at the moment.

Last month at the winter meetings, club officials were debating his merits compared to Ranger Suárez, a fellow lefty the Orioles were tied to before the Red Sox signed him. There seems to be an appreciation of Valdez’s consistency in getting a team to the playoffs, and based on how several people in the organization speak about prospect Luis De León, who has similar characteristics to Valdez, they value what that profile brings.

Conversely, manager Craig Albernaz and new slugger Pete Alonso on multiple occasions this weekend praised the front office for not only bringing in good players but good people who fit into the clubhouse. An incident in September in which Valdez showed no remorse after a cross-up with his catcher two pitches after a home run could be disqualifying, though the Orioles executives have enough background with Valdez to determine whether they want to give him the largest pitching contract in franchise history.

If they don’t, the list drops off quickly beyond him. Zac Gallen, like Valdez, would require the Orioles to sacrifice a draft pick since he rejected the qualifying offer. Gallen would provide the innings and relative steadiness this rotation could use, but it wouldn’t be an emphatic way to end the offseason. And the likes of Justin Verlander and Chris Bassitt would be more enticing had the Charlie Morton and Kyle Gibson experiences gone better in 2025.

Valdez would be the best arm to get, but really, what’s left on the free agent market are pitchers who would better-than-competently fill innings in a rotation with tantalizing upside thanks to Kyle Bradish, Trevor Rogers and Baz, with Dean Kremer and Tyler Wells also in the mix. Eflin fits somewhere in the middle, considering how good he was in 2024, with his back surgery creating uncertainty as to whether he can get back to that level.

Even as it happened, trading for Baz felt smart because Elias did satisfy his offseason goal of adding a pitcher who could slot into the front half of the rotation and now has the flexibility to fill out the rotation as he sees fit.

At this point, nothing would surprise me. There’s nothing riskier than giving out a long-term contract that will carry a free agent starting pitcher into his mid-30s, the way any meaningful deal with Valdez would. There’s also nothing safer than swallowing hard and doing it — if your goal is to rebuild the perception of your team as a contender.

That, remember, was the goal entering this winter for Elias. I’d say it’s probably been accomplished, so after doing so many things counter to the club’s long-held belief structure — trading Rodriguez for pending free agent Taylor Ward, signing Alonso, sending four prospects and a draft pick to Tampa Bay for Baz — it would be understandable if he drew the line here.

That competitive balance pick being dealt means the pick the Orioles would lose for signing Valdez or Gallen would be later in the draft, but it’s still limiting to sacrifice another pick. Add in the age concerns, the baked-in risk of long-term pitching contracts and what a club with several high-minors prospects who could realistically take rotation spots in the second half of 2026 actually needs, and you have a lot of reasons to add more modestly to the rotation than many expect.

The Orioles care about all of those things. If they let Valdez sign elsewhere, those will all be key reasons. And yet I sit here wondering how much, exactly, they care about what they used to, given how differently they’ve operated this winter.

None of what’s happened since the season ended would have happened in past offseasons. They’ve accomplished so much by throwing out the old playbook. How it applies to their pursuit of free agent pitching is probably going to decide whether anyone thinks they did enough to win.

I doubt, with the boxes already checked in their roster-building phase, that they thought they’d be in this spot. They are anyway.