Jon Meoli: The Orioles went against type in the draft. The risk involved might inform their deadline plans.

No sport has a wider gulf between what’s happening on the field every day and its amateur draft than baseball, where top picks are typically years away from helping the major league team if they make it at all.

For the Orioles, the outcomes this weekend — both on the field and in the draft room — are more aligned than ever. First-round pick Eric Booth Jr. will only see Camden Yards this year to sign his contract and maybe take batting practice.

The process behind the Orioles’ pick might just dictate what kind of major league environment that occurs in, because picking a high school hitter comes down to accepting an appropriate amount of risk to go with an incredible amount of upside.

It was probably just how the draft board shook out this weekend. But with all eyes on the Orioles’ front office and how they’ll handle this trade deadline with the team 46-51 but trending up in a muddled American League, they’re going to be looking at a proverbial board of risky paths.

It would be a risk to remove anything of value from a team that’s still firmly in the playoff mix, a risk to stand pat when this team cost $160 million and the downside to putting more resources toward a playoff spot would be far worse than missing it altogether; and a risk to part with too much future value to potentially help a team that ultimately may not have it in them to make a postseason push.

In 2022, it was the safe call to treat a team that was surging but still firmly outside the playoff race as a seller to consolidate for contention the next year. In 2023, under the Angelos family’s ownership, it was far less risky to keep intact a homegrown talent base that was the source of all hope in a spendthrift organization, even if it didn’t work out. It was relatively safe to add controllable depth in 2024 considering the team was only in the opening stages of its second-half spiral.

Now, there are no safe options. It sounds a little like the MLB draft, an operation where you gather thousands of data points and evaluate every possible outcome for a player years away from the majors and try to make decisions that can influence the next decade for the franchise as well as possible.

For as long as president of baseball operations Mike Elias has run this team, the Orioles have done that in a few specific ways. The tops of their drafts for so many years were populated by college hitters, a demographic that, because of their age and the data available, is the easiest to project as big leaguers.

Especially early on, when the Orioles’ only goal was to get as many good big leaguers to Baltimore as quickly as possible, this was a viable and appropriate approach, with the 2022 selection of high schooler Jackson Holliday at No. 1 overall the notable exception.

It got more complicated after that as the team picked later in the first round and the players available had more work to do to get to the majors, but they still preferred college hitters early and often, even as college pitchers crept up the board in recent years as that part of their operation gained steam.

Just because the range of outcomes is more comfortable doesn’t mean they include the best ones. Looking at the board the Orioles put together in their first draft under Will Robertson, who came up on the pro scouting side, they used two first-day picks, including No. 7 overall with Booth, on high-upside, higher-risk high school players who were young for the class. There were only two college hitters taken — second-round center fielder Ty Head (a draft-eligible sophomore) and 10th-round utilityman Carlos Sanchez.

Robertson didn’t take long to give the media a key as to what the team was seeking. He said Booth’s “engine,” both at the plate and with his legs, leads to “impact outcomes.” Robertson said they saw the team’s prep draftees as attractive because they’re “interesting, high-upside talent, and [we can] get them into the organization young and start their development at a younger, more moldable stage.”

The Orioles have a pretty strong track record in the Elias era of identifying worthy prep prospects, even in an environment where the safety of college hitters dictated their board. In the past, the organization has tasked its scouts with identifying which high school players are the kinds of people who can deal with how hard pro ball may be.

Gunnar Henderson is the most notable from the second round in 2019. But there are no obvious whiffs from their high school picks in the ensuing years, with Darell Hernaiz, Coby Mayo, Carter Baumler and Jackson Holliday all reaching the big leagues, and Nate George and Creed Willems still performing well in the organization.

Some of the game’s biggest stars were high school draftees who benefited from developing in pro ball rather than going to college, but even understanding that and seeing it benefit Henderson firsthand at the alternative training site during the pandemic in 2020, the Orioles have been judicious in taking that route in the draft.

These are different times, though, for so many reasons. The Orioles have more avenues to populate the major league roster with good players than just drafting higher-floor college hitters. They can sign really good ones in free agency, as they did with Pete Alonso, or they can trade for good hitters like they did with Taylor Ward and Blaze Alexander.

The draft, at least in this iteration, turned out to be one where they emphasized the impact outcomes and took the commensurate swings. And that feels notable as we sit here at the All-Star break with the Orioles riding a four-game winning streak, albeit with the associated high deflated by Alexander’s broken hand.

That injury has absolutely no silver lining to it from a baseball sense; he’s been one of the best hitters in baseball since the beginning of May. But as Elias and his team huddle this week to figure out what to do, it’s a useful reminder of the stakes of their deadline decisions.

Alexander was acquired as downside protection. They had no viable alternatives should an injury catastrophe hit their infield, and he stepped up when it did. But they gave up a lot for him, and assumed the risk of doing so, and saw the reward.

That’s not always been viable for the Orioles. Sometimes, the safe route is the best one. From the moment this offseason began, that hasn’t been the case. Look at all the big trades and big contracts they’ve handed out. Look at all the high school draftees they’re about to sign.

There’s a risk tolerance here that we haven’t seen before. And typically, how the Orioles approach the draft bleeds through to everything else.