BALTIMORE -- When he was hired to lead the Orioles' baseball-operations department last November, executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias outlined a sweeping vision that called for the modernization of nearly every facet of the organization, from scouting to player development to analytics and beyond. The plan to rebuild came with two caveats that Elias has never run from: The process might be painful at times, and it would take time.

Nearly a full season in, those principles remain true even as the rebuild gets set to hit its second phase. Elias said Sunday the club will continue to take a “broad, strategic organizational view” as it heads into its first full offseason with him at the helm, citing success amid its second straight 100-loss season.

“We’ve got a lot of areas to get better at, that’s no secret. But overall, we sit back and look at what happened around the organization this year, and it was a very positive year. A lot was accomplished across the organization,” Elias said. “I can’t ask anyone to embrace losing the way we have been. Nobody wants to do this. We never want this to happen again. But this is where we started from. We took this on trying to fix it. To do that, we’re making changes. We’re not doing the same things that’ve been done here before. It’s difficult, and we’re far behind.”

Numerous times in his 15-minute media session on Sunday, Elias directly referenced the state the organization was in when he inherited it last November. He’s since taken significant steps to boost the analytics and international scouting operations in particular, both of which were among the smallest in baseball. The Orioles are also investing in technology on the player-development side like never before. Those initiatives figure to continue taking priority this winter over the big league roster.

“Winning a couple extra games is not the end goal,” Elias said. “We want to get to the playoffs and have the organization be in a healthy spot for a long time. That will be first and foremost.”

Both privately and publicly, Elias and first-year manager Brandon Hyde have been realistic about how much work remains to be done in order to achieve that goal. Coming off a franchise-worst 115 losses last season, the Orioles are 51-105 with six games to go after Sunday’s 2-1 win over Seattle.

They set the Major League single-season record for home runs allowed. They also own a minus-264 run differential this season, which was littered with lopsided losses, often uncompetitive play and several examples of dugout discord.

The Orioles cycled through a franchise-high 58 players and made sweeping personnel changes to their organizational ranks, dismissing at least 25 staffers in the baseball-operations, scouting and player-development departments. Elias reiterated Sunday their plans to hire extensively during his first full offseason on the job. Much of that recruitment initiative will be spearheaded by newly hired director of player development Matt Blood.

Elias called “improving the overall talent level in the organization” his top priority heading into the offseason, saying “what comes after that is secondary.” He also spoke positively of the job Hyde did under exceptionally difficult circumstances.

“We’ve talked a lot about this year and how hard it’s been,” Hyde said. “It’s been hard. It’s been a trying process. It’s hard to see, and I can totally understand the frustration right now. But it will get better. … I’m just asking for everyone’s patience with this, and I just want fans to feel good about the start of this process and trust that it’s going to get a lot better.”

At the big league level, improvement came in the form of career years from Trey Mancini and Jonathan Villar, the surprise emergence of John Means, Hanser Alberto and Anthony Santander and late-season glimpses of prospects Hunter Harvey and Austin Hays. But perhaps the biggest improvement came from the farm system, which saw wide-scale growth on the pitching side and was bolstered by a generally well-regarded Draft class headlined by No. 1 overall pick Adley Rutschman.

Widely viewed one of the sport’s more barren a year ago, the Orioles' system is now generally considered above-average. Elias called the progress on that front “ahead of schedule” when speaking this weekend. How active the Orioles are on the trade market largely depends on if their better chips (Villar and Mychal Givens) can net prospects to bolster it further.

“This is a long process,” Elias said. “We know where we’re starting from. This is not easy. We’re heading in the right direction.”