Another Orioles molehill, and another occasion for the fanciful and fatalists alike to forecast what the future holds.

Every little thing the Orioles do is now a referendum on their rebuild, and going the Trey Mancini-John Means arbitration scenario is no exception.

As Birdland Rorschach tests go, this one feels a little flimsy. But here we are.

Since the Orioles and stars Trey Mancini and John Means filed arbitration salaries on Tuesday in lieu of an agreement near the midpoints, there’s been no shortage of discourse over whether they should have ever let it get to this point, how them engaging in this process makes the club look, and what it means now and going forward.

Add in some old-school payroll shaming by Joc Pederson, of all people, and even in one of the more active news periods in recent baseball memory coming out of the lockout, we’re in an boom period for browbeating the Orioles.

Roll into spring training with an active payroll around $30 million, as the Orioles are, and there are just some shots you’re going to have to take. But the rest of it — wondering when Mancini will be traded, bemoaning the lack of long-term contract talks with either of those players, fearing the mere mention of trade talks around Cedric Mullins or Austin Hays — doesn’t strike me as a natural outgrowth from an unpleasant but established part of the game.

Then again, to that crowd, taking the time to learn the how and why behind the Orioles’ vision at every level of the organization, then filtering what they say and do through that lens probably doesn’t seem too natural either.

The cynical view is far easier to take, but those polar views have the same origin: this rebuild as we know it began in the middle of 2018, and four years into it, there’s still a massive void that anyone following the Orioles can fill in based on how they want to view things.

At its most basic level, this is the Orioles’ fault — not only the Mike Elias Orioles, but the situation he inherited as well. The mid-2010s Orioles were so pot-committed that they felt they had no choice but to ride the hand out with their top stars, and underlying player development deficiencies meant the next wave wasn’t ready to replace them after the 11th-hour trades of July 2018.

The four Orioles spring training nuggets that fascinated me the most this week

The best players were stripped from an Orioles team that was already terrible, and to the extent there even was a next wave in place, Elias slow-played many of them and over the ensuing seasons traded away nearly all of the team’s experienced (and higher-paid) players without meaningfully trying to improve the major league product at all.

That’s their prerogative, and they’ve said all along that there will be investments made in the major league club when the homegrown portion of their roster is in place. That leaves them open to plenty of warranted criticism until that happens, as it’s easy to doubt that will actually happen given recent big league spending.

It’s worth considering the point of view that it won’t, which is part of a darker set of colors to fill in this years-long void. Decades of false-dawns, a division of four full-stride contenders pulling away as the Orioles are just starting to walk, and no small amount of disappointment driven by a lack of financial commitment created that filter for so many.

That’s how one rages about the internet, so mad that the Orioles are bad that they keep the organization’s efforts to change that at arm’s length, instead living in a world where it’s a given that everything they do will keep them bad. Trading Mancini, something that’s probably a net neutral in terms of what it gains them short- and long-term, is somehow now the touchstone for that. It’s emotional, to be sure, but lacks the perspective of the player himself who might welcome a fresh start, a lighter leadership load, and a chance to play for a contender for even part of 2022.

No matter. Trading him will be, in some parts, the latest indignity but certainly not the last. It will mean the same is on tap for Means, for Mullins, eventually for Ryan Mountcastle, and maybe in five years for Rutschman. First they came for the Pirates’ ballpark dimensions, and then they became the Pirates, the expectation goes.

The Orioles are four months from another No. 1 overall pick. Expectations for who it could be, even now, could lead to disappointment.

The obvious retort — questioning why there’s so much built upon hypotheticals — can be lobbed at the other side as well. Basing one’s view off the idea that the Orioles will develop enough talent to fill out their major league lineup with championship-caliber hitters and still have enough quality left over to trade for a rotation to match it is as fanciful as the other side is fatalistic.

As it stands now, the bull view is probably just as outsized as the bear. An easy, and valid, critique of those who bought in is that the point of amassing so many well-regarded prospects is that it protects against the reality that they don’t all work out. Not everyone is going to be a big leaguer. Even fewer of those will be stars. A vast majority of these players will not be good enough, and despite the numbers they put up, some probably aren’t already.

The Orioles have, realistically, been much more in the business of manufacturing prospects rather than delivering major leaguers to Baltimore for the last three years. Means, Mullins, and Ryan Mountcastle all came good since Elias took over but were holdover players who get as much credit for creating their own success as the organization should.

This could (honestly, should) be the year that sliding scale shifts, though. Until it does, it’s all just projecting personal expectations onto a present that welcomes it. This vacuum exists because of a philosophical belief that there are no degrees of competitiveness — either you are ready to play deep into October, or you aren’t, and only the first kind of roster warrants any kind of meaningful resources.

Perhaps none of this would happen if the Orioles were — I don’t know — the wheeler-dealer Mariners, who have a top-ranked farm system, make a bunch of trades every year, and have nothing to show for it. They’d just be allowed to keep doing their thing.

Instead, they’re last in payroll, last in the standings, and fast approaching a point in their rebuild where neither should be the case anymore. When that time comes, we’ll know who was right.