BALTIMORE _ As with every other team to line up opposite the Orioles over the last few months, the defending champion Houston Astros are rightfully seen as possible examples for their hosts this weekend at Camden Yards.
In this case, it's even more apt. At the beginning of this decade, the Astros were a veteran team that began the season trying to hang onto something and ended up losing 106 games in 2011. After that offseason, they replaced general manager Ed Wade with Jeff Luhnow, who oversaw a franchise overhaul using scouting and analytics that's not unlike what the Orioles hope to undertake. Manager Brad Mills didn't last the next season.
And perhaps most pertinent to the present-day Orioles, those who will play this weekend against an Astros team primed to defend its title should take note of just who is out there doing so for Houston: hardly anyone from the Astros team that was so bad it required a full-scale rebuild is around now to see the fruits of it.
Looking at the Astros' roster from 2011, there's only one name that celebrated last year at Dodger Stadium that saw the bad-old days that necessitated such widespread change: Jose Altuve, then a 21-year-old infielder who came up that July.
Since then, Altuve has appeared in six All-Star Games, won the MVP award in 2017, and won the Gold Glove in 2015. He's a career .316 hitter who has done nothing but hit since he arrived that summer in 2011, and saw countless rounds of roster turnover in the lean years before the team turned things around.
Likewise, hardly any of their World Series core was even in the farm system in Houston at that time. They'd just selected future All-Star outfielder George Springer out of UConn, and he's blossomed into a two-time All-Star himself, and he was their No. 3-ranked prospect in Baseball America's 2012 rankings.
Their top prospect at the time was slugger Jonathan Singleton, who hit all the way through the minors but hasn't become a big-league bat. Both Singleton and Jarred Cosart took the top two spots in the Baseball America rankings after coming from Philadelphia in a late-season trade for Hunter Pence, as did No. 6 prospect Domingo Santana. Springer was No. 3, and infielder Jonathan Villar _ now with the Orioles _ was No. 4.
Villar broke in and played well with the Astros, but was dealt to the Milwaukee Brewers after the 2015 season, right after the Astros broke through to the playoffs for the first time.
Missing from those 2012 top-10 rankings, however, was a key piece _ left-hander Dallas Keuchel. He was ranked No. 21 as a touch-and-feel left-hander with back-end rotation potential. He's far exceeded that, and won the 2015 Cy Young Award in the process.
So the Astros had a future MVP and a future Cy Young winner in their ranks as they began what will go down, along with the concurrent Chicago Cubs championship rebuild, as one of the best in the game. The rest of it, simply put, took losing, and losing a lot. They spent the ensuing years trying to develop players only to trade them for long-term upgrades, and concurrent drafts yielded the likes of Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman.
"That's why they were drafting No. 1," Orioles manager Buck Showalter said. "They got Correa. When it was Chicago and them both in it, you go back through how all those players were acquired."
