Baltimore had a very productive offseason. That's true whether you measure it by what the new players have done or what they're projected to do — the Orioles ranked first in baseball in blended net WAR, the only team that tops both the backward-looking and forward-looking ledgers.
But "a productive offseason" and "did enough" are different questions. The Orioles added +4.7 blended WAR through transactions this winter, the largest positive shift in the league. The question is whether that's enough to close the gap with the top of a stacked AL East.
To answer that, we ran every 2025-26 offseason transaction through two WAR frameworks — historical and projected — and blended them into a single composite.
How We Measured It
Every player involved in a roster-changing transaction was evaluated through two lenses:
Historical WAR: An average of FanGraphs fWAR across available seasons (2023-2025). This rewards track record and treats every season equally.
Marcel Projected WAR: A forward-looking forecast using Tom Tango's Marcel methodology — recency-weighted performance (5/4/3), regression to the mean based on playing time, and an age curve that boosts players under 28 and penalizes those over 28.
The final blended WAR is a 50/50 mix of the two. This deliberately balances what happened with what's likely to happen.
The Orioles' Offseason, Player by Player
Baltimore's major additions and departures, ranked by blended WAR impact:
Player | Direction | Historical WAR | Projected WAR | Blended WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Pete Alonso | Added | 2.8 | 0.7 | 1.75 |
Taylor Ward | Added | 2.4 | 0.3 | 1.35 |
Zach Eflin | Re-signed | 2.6 | 0.1 | 1.35 |
Chris Bassitt | Added | 2.4 | 0.2 | 1.34 |
Grayson Rodriguez | Lost | 1.9 | 0.5 | 1.25 |
Shane Baz | Added | 1.6 | 0.5 | 1.02 |
The headline number — +9.3 net historical WAR — makes this look like one of the best offseasons in recent memory. But the projection system tells a dramatically different story. Pete Alonso's 2.8 historical average drops to a 0.7 projection. Chris Bassitt goes from 2.4 to 0.2. Zach Eflin's track record shows 2.6 WAR per year, but the Marcel forecast projects just 0.1.
The gap between the two lenses is enormous — the largest in baseball. That's not a red flag, but it's worth understanding: Baltimore's additions are overwhelmingly 30+ veterans whose historical WAR far exceeds their projected WAR. The age curve hits every one of these signings hard. The Orioles are betting that these players perform closer to their track records than their Marcel forecasts suggest.
If they're right, this is a top-tier roster. If the projections are right, it's still the best offseason in baseball — just not by as much as the headlines suggest.
How It Compares to the Rest of the AL East
Baltimore didn't just win the offseason in the abstract — they won it relative to every division rival, all of whom either stood pat or got worse.
Team | Net Hist | Net Proj | Net Blend |
|---|---|---|---|
BAL | +9.3 | +0.1 | +4.7 |
BOS | -0.2 | +0.3 | +0.1 |
TOR | -1.1 | +0.8 | -0.2 |
TB | -0.9 | -0.5 | -0.7 |
NYY | -2.6 | -0.3 | -1.4 |
Division average: +0.5 blended WAR (pulled up almost entirely by Baltimore)
The Yankees had the division's worst offseason, losing -2.6 net historical WAR and -1.4 blended. They added Cody Bellinger but lost more than they gained. For the Orioles, this is significant context — the team they're chasing got worse on paper this winter while Baltimore got meaningfully better.
Toronto's numbers are deceptive. The historical view shows -1.1, but the projected view flips to +0.8 thanks to Kazuma Okamoto's 1.8 projected WAR (an NPB signing with no MLB history) and the Dylan Cease acquisition. The Blue Jays' offseason looks flat historically but modestly positive through the forward-looking lens.
Boston was essentially neutral — a +0.1 blended net that amounts to a roster hold rather than an upgrade or downgrade.
The Projection Gap: What It Means for Baltimore
The gap between Baltimore's historical and projected numbers is the largest in baseball, and it points to a specific risk profile.
Player | Historical WAR | Projected WAR | Gap | Age |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Zach Eflin | 2.6 | 0.1 | +2.5 | 32 |
Chris Bassitt | 2.4 | 0.2 | +2.2 | 37 |
Pete Alonso | 2.8 | 0.7 | +2.1 | 32 |
Taylor Ward | 2.4 | 0.3 | +2.1 | 33 |
Every major addition is on the wrong side of 30. The Marcel age curve penalizes all of them — Bassitt's age-37 season draws the steepest discount — and the regression component pulls their projections toward replacement level based on the typical career arc of players their age.
This doesn't mean the projections are right — Marcel is a baseline system designed to be conservative, and plenty of 32-year-olds outperform their Marcel forecasts. But it does mean that Baltimore's upside hinges more on veteran performance holding up than on young player development, which is a different risk profile than this organization has carried in recent years.
Where Baltimore Ranks League-Wide
For context, here's where the Orioles sit among the top offseasons in baseball:
Rank | Team | Net Historical | Net Projected | Net Blended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | BAL | +9.3 | +0.1 | +4.7 |
2 | PIT | +5.3 | +2.3 | +3.9 |
3 | COL | +5.3 | +1.8 | +3.5 |
4 | SF | +4.8 | +1.5 | +3.2 |
5 | LAD | +3.1 | +1.0 | +2.0 |
Baltimore leads comfortably in historical WAR and tops the blended column by nearly a full win over Pittsburgh. The Orioles didn't just have a good offseason; they had a clearly better offseason than everyone else.
What This Means for 2026
This blended WAR framework feeds directly into the Birdland Metrics preseason ELO model. Each team's net roster change is one of the inputs that shapes the preseason rating — alongside mean-reverted prior-year ELO and FanGraphs' projected team WAR — which in turn drives the win projections and playoff odds you see on the site.
Baltimore's +4.7 blended net WAR translates to the largest positive preseason shift in the league. But the Orioles are starting from a low baseline after a disappointing 2025, and even the best offseason in baseball can only do so much to override a full season of underwhelming results in a backward-looking model.
The projections currently have Baltimore at 81 wins with a 37.1% chance of making the playoffs. That's below where most Orioles fans would put this roster — and that tension is the point. The model is waiting to see these additions perform on the field before giving them full credit. If Alonso, Bassitt, Eflin, and Ward produce closer to their track records than their projections, the ELO system will respond quickly. Every win above expectation pushes the rating upward, and by mid-season the preseason anchor will have fully faded.
Three things to watch:
April production from the new veterans. The gap between Baltimore's historical and projected WAR will start resolving immediately. If Alonso is hitting like a 2.8-WAR player in May rather than a 0.7-WAR player, the model will adjust accordingly — and the playoff odds will climb.
The Grayson Rodriguez trade cost. Losing 1.25 blended WAR in a young, cost-controlled arm is the one clear negative. Whether the return (and the roster flexibility it created) justifies the loss will take time to evaluate.
The AL East rivals who got worse. The Yankees lost -1.4 blended WAR. If that regression shows up in their record, the division race tightens from both directions — Baltimore climbing and New York slipping. The model currently projects a 7-win gap between them. A strong April from the Orioles and a slow start from the Yankees could cut that in half before Memorial Day.
Data sources: MLB Stats API (transactions), FanGraphs (fWAR via pybaseball), Chadwick Register (player ID mapping), NPB/KBO translation factors, MLB Pipeline prospect rankings. Marcel projection methodology per Tom Tango.
