3 Reasons To Be Immediately Skeptical Of Orioles New "GM" Hire

The Baltimore Orioles remain, in baseball operations, a Mike Elias operation in every way, shape and form, and their announcing of a new “general manager” Monday changes none of that.

Bringing in longtime Cubs exec Jared Banner to get a fancy title is nice and all, and more power to him. Certainly, this broken organization embarking on YEAR NINE of Elias’s endless failed rebuild needs new thoughts and minds involved. The problem is, absolutely nothing about the structure of baseball ops is changing, this was entirely Elias’s hire as we hear it and Banner is far beneath Elias on the organizational flowchart no matter what kind of silly word games the Orioles want to play with their press releases.

Elias pushed out some longtime underlings and reassigned a few, but he made it very clear in his end-of-season press conference that what he believes in isn’t changing (he will alter the values in his supercomputer that runs the team, though!), and billionaire owner David Rubenstein has made it clear over and over how much autonomy Elias has and how much belief he has in the proven failure. There was no search firm involved or outside hand guiding the decision to hire Banner, and ain’t no way ownership found this guy.

This is part of Elias rearranging the deck chairs around him as he steers the Baseball Titanic into the same icebergs it hits every year – not enough pitching, league-worst fielding, no situational hitting, silly roster construction with no viable bench and redundancies everywhere. The decision to keep as feckless and overmatched an MLB manager as I have seen in 52 years on this planet before the search for this alleged GM even began, tells you everything about the process, and what this really means.

As everyone we have discussed this with on “The Daily Flock Show” has pointed out (Jim Duquette, Kyle Glaser, Jarrett Siedler, Dan Szymborski, Buck Showalter, all before the fact), this was never going to be a GM hire in the traditional sense as that person having final say on baseball matters and evaluations and acquisitions. It’s anything but. That’s still Elias.

The Elias Way prevails. It killed The Oriole Way years ago.

He Isn’t A Real GM

It was only back on January when the Orioles announced yet another promotion for Matt Blood, who, as they put it at the time “will still oversee Minor League player development and operations, but he will also provide executive support for the Major League staff and player development group.” This is who Banner is replacing, just with a sexier title and, I suppose, more money.

You need to offer the title to get the person to make more than a lateral move, but the job description is very similar to what was created for Blood, to say nothing of the cluster of assistant GM’s Elias already surrounded himself with (flunkies, to be real), all handpicked by him. From the opening sentence of the press release announcing Banner’s hire: “Banner will lead the organization’s player development, coaching and performance efforts.”

Sounds familiar!

Elias decided by getting loathsome Sig Mejdal out of The Warehouse more often – but still available to wreck personnel decisions via text and phone – and throwing Blood out – he could sell this as some sort of repositioning of the franchise. It’s just more of the same.

When Banner’s release mentions the new “GM” will “work alongside” Elias, they really mean work under him. Elias has full authority over baseball ops and he and his puppet skipper made that clear at the end of this latest lost season and Rubenstein has made it abundantly clear as he meets with the wealthy and powerful and does his speeches in Manhattan and DC.

They Are Gutting The Org

These owners have been whining about a non-existent salary cap since they bought the team, they just fired Mr. Splash and The Orioles Bird(s) to save some chump change after forcing a bunch of people out with weak offers the year before. And every week Rubenstein says something else that makes you wonder why the hell he bought this team at all.

So, um, playing around with middle managers in the front office and moving a little money around in that regard isn’t fooling anyone. This team has massive roster needs and there is zero indication significant funds will be opened up to make those additions and Elias is incredibly risk-averse and wants to save these owners money above all else. Certainly more than he cares about truly competing.

That’s why he’s kept his job despite being unmasked as a fraud since at least the 2023 trade deadline (and probably sooner). If you don’t think Banner knows the deal on the way in, you are a rube. They’re already hiding behind a lockout that hasn’t happened yet to slash headcount.

Big Market Background / No Juice

Given all of the above, it strikes me as odd that this hire doesn’t come from an overachieving franchise like the Brewers or Rays. Not even close. And it was never going to be someone who had actually carried anything close to traditional GM duties before, because Elias would view that as a threat.

Banner might be great. And heck, I’d be up for giving him Elias’s job (I’d be up for giving pretty much anyone Elias’s job at this point). But in the fake-GM role he was cast in, it’s a little odd to me he as spent his entire baseball career with the Mets, Red Sox and Cubs, three big market teams that haven’t exactly won consistently or lived up to expectations or even spent to the degree most of their fans would like many years given just what cash cows those franchises are.

Banner isn’t coming from the Little Engine That Could, Elias hired his first manager from the Cubs, and I can’t seem to come up with much of anything that the Cubs or Mets were doing to innovate during Banner’s time there. He’s got ties to Theo Epstein, which can’t hurt I guess, breaking into scouting with Boston in 2007, but Elias was never hiring anyone who had run a front office before or had final say or had a background that was counter to his beliefs.

So Banner is being set up to fail given who picked him and when he picked him. We’d be astonished if this worked; it’s devised to be an extension of the status quo that has been a total failure, so is likely hardwired to produce those same results.

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