What Process Are The Orioles Trusting?

Not a lot of owners would have let Mike Elias do what he has done with the Baltimore Orioles. This was true in a negative, how-dare-you-sir sense when the team's John Angelos–led ownership entrusted Elias with overseeing a more strategic approach to bottoming all the way out, following a 115-loss 2018 season in which then-GM Dan Duquette traded away every veteran he could before being fired that November. Those deals netted 15 players; of those, only Dean Kremer would go on to contribute positively to a good Orioles team. Much of that is on Duquette, but also a great deal of time elapsed in there. Baltimore's first playoff appearance of the Elias era didn't arrive until 2023. That was when the best of the prospects he had selected, with the high draft picks that were the reward of those spectacularly abject seasons, came together as the core of a team that won the American League East before meekly bowing out of the postseason in three games. It was easier to see the vision when the Orioles ran a $60 million payroll and won 101 games that year than it was during the half-decade that the team spent splashing around in the toilet, but Elias made sure to emphasize, in the good years and the bad, and in the brisk way that baseball executives emphasize this sort of thing, that the vision was indeed there. During the most fragrant of the toilet years, Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson were still abstract and dreamy around the edges in the ways that even the best prospects are; by 2023, both had arrived as big-league stars on a team that looked like it would go on to win a lot of games. Even at what now looks like that team's comparatively middling peak, there was the sense that Elias's personal vision of how the team should be run was still being prioritized over the urgency of the moment. That he was able to get away with that surely owed something to how unsettled the team's ownership situation was, and to how little he asked of those owners beyond their patience and faith. The Angelos family improvised several seasons of Succession in public before selling the team to private equity billionaire David Rubenstein in January 2024. A baseball executive's livelihood is dependent on their skills at managing up, and Elias has never wavered in projecting the sort of cocksure executive mastery that pleases the extremely rich. It has to all appearances worked quite well on both sets of bosses.

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