The four main takeaways from this season on the Orioles farm

Infield breakouts, slow international progress, pitching transitions and a difficult realization are what defined the Orioles' minor league season to me this summer.

We remember 2019 as the year the Orioles’ minor league pitching program took off, and the post-pandemic 2021 season as the one where the hitting program did the same. If there’s a defining characteristic of 2022, it’s that the people and processes enough might be durable enough to sustain their player development successes long beyond the pending years where they aren’t adding top-5 draft picks and utilizing massive bonus pools every year.

With Norfolk’s season ending Tuesday, another season on the farm is officially closing. A lot has happened, and it’s been really fun documenting it all here. [More on this later, but just because the season’s ending doesn’t mean anything changes around here.] Still, the dozens of minor league games I saw and reported from produced plenty of snapshots, and a season’s end requires a broader view.

Here are, to me, the four most significant takeaways from the 2022 season on the Orioles’ farm.