Three eras of the Orioles ago, the team had a choice to make about whether to keep its incumbent first basemen/designated hitters or whether to roll the dice on prospects in hopes that they could provide cheaper but acceptable production at the position.

Chris Davis got mega bucks, Mark Trumbo got big bucks, and Christian Walker, by then a 25-year-old with fine but absolutely unremarkable Triple-A numbers, got put on waivers.

If you absorb baseball chiefly through the same biases that I do, where the Orioles are the center around which all else orbits and teams who they seldom see are irrelevant, it may be a surprise to you that same Walker is now a free agent.

Not just any free agent: Walker is going to be such a coveted player to sign that the Diamondbacks, who’ve been his home for the last eight seasons, extended a qualifying offer to him, which he will presumably decline before tomorrow’s deadline to do so.

That means he’ll come with a draft pick cost to sign him, but it’s one that the Orioles should be willing to pay to sign the right player.

The case for Walker is built almost entirely on his past three years, where this surprising late bloomer has batted a combined .250/.332/.481 in his age 31-33 seasons. That’s included 95 home runs and a nearly 4 WAR per 162 game average over this time.

Walker is also the winner of the last three Gold Gloves at first base in the National League, awards that are backed up by the Statcast measures of defense.

Walker also comes with some playoff success, as the unexpected 2023 Diamondbacks run into the World Series saw Walker doing heavy lifting in the earlier rounds of that postseason. This is the kind of play every day veteran hitter who the team simply did not have a year ago.

That’s not the only reason that the team ended up its season where it did, but I do think it’s a reason, and one that the team should and likely will look to address this coming offseason.

The Orioles are not lacking in the right-handed hitting first baseman department right now. Ryan Mountcastle is under team control for the next two seasons, and prospect Coby Mayo – currently in the top 10 on MLB Pipeline’s league-wide prospect ranking – is waiting to break in for good, possibly with first base as his future defensive home.

There’s risk involved in adding a free agent into this mix, possibly trading one or both before we’ve seen their best.

There’s also risk involved in the Orioles plowing ahead into the 2025 season with the exact same offense that ran out of gas in August and was still nowhere to be found by the time October rolled around.

That is, the exact same offense minus Anthony Santander, the team’s most prolific home run hitter and one of only two to reach 25+ dingers. Something is going to have to get better, and being sentimental about “our guys” can’t be what stops the Orioles from getting better.

When you get down to it, the kind of three-year stretch that Walker just had is ultimately what the Orioles wish they could get from Mountcastle or even Mayo.

If Mountcastle’s ceiling is essentially a 2.5-win player, which he was in 2024, while Walker could fire off 3-4 win seasons, that’s something that the Orioles would have to consider. They are in a position where paying some extra money to add one or two wins of potential to their roster is valuable to them.

Mike Elias is not someone who has shown much sentiment when it comes to roster-making decisions. Just this past season, he’s already popped the seal on “trade a veteran who is fine enough” when he dealt Austin Hays to the Phillies.

I’m confident that it’s not going to be sentiment that stops him from making a move. It would be neater to fit in a righty-batting outfielder – maybe another qualifying offer guy like Teoscar Hernández, but that can’t be the only figurative basket in which the Orioles place their eggs.

On the scale of free agents these days, Walker is projected for a relatively modest signing, with different places putting him down at three years and in the range of $50-60 million in total.

That’s small enough that one can imagine there could still be enough to make another impactful signing over the course of the coming winter, if all of our guesses about Rubenstein impacting the payroll will come to fruition.

It’s also short enough that you don’t have to wince too hard at handing out that many years to a guy who’s already shown quality from 31-33 as he heads to 34-36. That’s not to say there are no possible downsides. This past season was the only one of the last three where Walker missed time on the injured list, and his performance dipped over the final month after his return.

The downside to the Orioles right now is not so much potential wasted money as it is on having a guy with a guaranteed roster spot who ends up stinking.

A big variable in thinking about the Orioles and their current and possible future right-handed hitters was added into the mix just at the end of last week, with the news that the O’s will be screwing around with the left field fence dimensions again.

Recognizing that they went too far with both the depth from home and the height from the ground of Walltimore, the Orioles are bringing the fences closer and making them a little shorter.

This can’t hurt the Orioles if they do try to pursue a right-handed hitter, but it’s also likely to make Mountcastle a more productive player than he has been.

He’s lost eleven homers over the past three seasons to the wall. Some of those will come back with the new dimensions.

Then again, that’s only 3-4 more home runs per season. A Mountcastle who hit 16 home runs (or even 20, if he played an extra 25 games) instead of 13 in 2024 would not be that much more exciting. That would still be in “The Orioles need to get more out of first base” territory.

There is value in a 25-30 home run guy who posts a better OBP than Mountcastle is likely to do… if Walker can be that guy for two or three years.

When it comes to plugging veteran free agent hitters onto recent Orioles teams, they can and have done worse than Christian Walker.

Whether they ever sign a top-end free agent or not, the team is going to need to find some mid-range free agent successes too in order to achieve its maximum potential each season.