The Orioles returned home from this week's baseball winter meetings with a pair of outfielders selected in the Rule 5 draft, an event that caps the meetings and runs at a breakneck pace.
For some teams, it's an afterthought. Others treat it like the end of a busy week full of trades and free-agent signings. For the Orioles, it has become a defining aspect of their offseasons — the culmination of months of work from every corner of the organization, all in the name of finding an advantage at the edges of other clubs' rosters..
As such, the draft gets plenty of resources thrown its way — an amount commensurate with the fact that a team on a budget can get a major league player for cheap, if it does its homework.