SARASOTA—A year ago, David Rubenstein was waiting for approval on his bid to buy the Orioles, and that came just before last March’s Opening Day.

Rubenstein quickly won fans over by greeting them before the opener and tossing hats and balls throughout Camden Yards. He even served as Mr. Splash one evening.

In his first year, the Orioles qualified for their second consecutive postseason before they were swept in two games by the Kansas City Royals in the Wild Card Series.

A year later, Rubenstein was quick to endorse executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias and manager Brandon Hyde’s stewardship of the team, and cite the Orioles’ 56 percent increase in payroll, highest in the major leagues.

“I think the team is in pretty good shape,” Rubenstein told the Baltimore and Japanese media on Monday. “We have a really solid team. We’ve added to it during the offseason and I’m very pleased with the team, and I think we have a chance to go all the way. Absolutely.”

Rubenstein said he talked with Elias daily, and Elias kept him and his partner, Mike Arougheti, informed of his moves during the offseason.

The 75-year-old said that the payroll, which is currently $160 million, 15^th in Major League Baseball, could go higher.

“I don’t have a financial limit,” Rubenstein said. “The team is in very good financial shape. We don’t have debt problems, we don’t have financial challenges or anything like that.

“We want to put the best team on the field we can, and we don’t have a constraint by saying there’s a certain amount of money we’d spend. So we can get the best team we can get. We will try to do that, and if it costs more money, then we’ll do it. But we don’t have any particular financial constraints.”

Before he met with the press, his first mass briefing since buying the team, Rubenstein said he shared the desire to extend the Orioles’ excellent young players, and that it could happen.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘confident’ because that would imply that I have some inside knowledge that I don’t really have,” Rubenstein said. “I would say, we have some great players. I had lunch today with two of the great ones, Adley [Rutschman] and Gunnar [Henderson], and they’re obviously very talented people. It was just a social lunch. I wasn’t talking business [with] them. It was mostly about their background.

“I recognize how baseball operates, and it would be great. If you can sign some people to longer-term contracts, but it takes a while to do it, and right now, we’re focused on getting the team ready for the season, and we’ll see what unfolds.

“I certainly would like the best young players we have on the team, and those are two I just mentioned to stay here in their career just like Brooks Robinson was here in his entire career. Jim Palmer was here his entire career. We’d like to have players stay with Baltimore for a long, long time [for] their entire career.

“Baseball is different than it was in the Brooks Robinson days and the Jim Palmer days, and we recognize that. We think that we’re putting together a team they’re very happy with, and we’re providing an atmosphere they’re very happy with, and we’ll just have to see what unfolds, but we’re not unaware of the desirability of doing what you suggest. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Last month, Rubenstein said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he would favor a salary cap in baseball.

“I would just say the best way to phrase it, everybody in baseball wants to have a competitive environment so every fan thinks every team can win any given year,” Rubenstein said. “Having a competitive environment is what we want and what other owners want. And, ultimately, I think that’s what I think the fans really want, too, is a competitive environment so no matter what city you live in, you think your team can win that year when the season begins. And that’s what I’m mostly focused on.”

For the 2025 season, there will be an improvement to the ballpark’s sound system, but the larger improvements will be done in the offsesaons after the 2025 and 2026 seasons.

“We’ll make things like better fan experiences, a bigger, better scoreboard, the clubhouses will be better for the players, the ability for the players to get into the clubhouse will be better,” he said. “I think the food experience and the ability to entertain in the stadium will be better. I think we’ve looked at what other stadiums have done and there have been a lot of improvements since Camden Yards came along 30 years ago.

“Remember, when Camden Yards came along 30 years ago, it was innovative and earth-shattering to people. But since that time in 30 years a lot of stadiums have been built and they’ve done some pretty good things. We look at what they’ve done and we’ll try to incorporate some of those things. I’m really looking forward to it. It won’t all be done by the end of ‘26, but a lot of it will be done for the next season. It will take two major offseasons to get it done.”

Rubenstein said that he would remain engaged with fans.

“In life you have to do what you’re good at,” Rubenstein said. “I’m not good at certain things, so when I bought the team, I said, ‘What can I help the team with?’ It probably isn’t by trying to second-guess the sabermetrics of some of our experts on things, so I thought I could be engaged with the community, and try to make speeches around the community, be philanthropically engaged, and show up at the games, engage the fans, sign autographs, selfies, or things like that, and I try to do as much of that as I physically can. So, I hope to be able to continue to do that until the fans are tired of me.”