Mike Elias's 6 Biggest Failures Explain Why The Orioles Are In Another Lost Season

It’s been nearly four years since Orioles baseball czar Mike Elias, after alienating his clubhouse with misguided comments at the trade deadline, flew down to Texas to address the issue with his players.

And then he set up shop before a game back in the dugout at Camden Yards, from where he has spewed so much utter nonsense over the years, and told the world just what an amazing job he was doing with his rebuild. It was Aug. 8, 2022, and Elias was feeling himself, having sold at the deadline and added a “frontline starer” (um, Cade Povich), and crowing about all of his top 100 prospects and a development system beyond reproach.

This, my friends, was LIFTOFF.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t bothered to sign the best pitcher he had ever drafted (Nolan McLean), because they had baseball figured out. Just ask them. No sense of urgency to buy proven talent or get better at the MLB level. He had all the answers just percolating at every level of the minors.

‘I’m so pleased and proud of where this organization is at,” Elias said, doing everything but patting himself on the back and giving himself a promotion on the spot (sadly that would come years later). “I can’t imagine a healthier spot than we’re in right now with this young group playing the way they are playing and pitching the way that we’re pitching.

“The farm system that we have, we’ve got six top 100 prospects, arguably. We’ve got a deep system and it just got deeper, especially on the pitching side the last couple of days. We’ve got a scouting and player development and coaching apparatus that is humming …

“And while I’m super excited about 2022 and what’s ahead of us and our chances, we’re going to continue with the plan of building this for a bright, long future in the American League East, and we think it’s liftoff from here for this team.”

Well, we all know the rest of the story. And astonishingly, instead of being fired years ago this overmatched, faux scout got himself and 16 cronies promoted before the start of 2026, only to have a first half of the season that was even worse than 2025 all things considered.

It’s hard to limit his massive failings to just 5-6 key items, but at this All-Star break we will take on that challenge. Here are his biggest failures:

Adley Over Witt

This sums up his greater evaluation failures and many, there are too damn many of them. He took the wrong player with his first-ever draft selection and it revealed so much. It lacked vision, it lacked guts, it lacked balls, it lacked foresight. (Pushing out top scout Dean Albany, who pushed for Witt, was quite a portal into these small-minded people, too).

He took the worse player and the older player (Adley was a 40th-round pick as a gift from his hometown Mariners when he was Witt’s age) because he thought he was safer. On, and Witt quickly signed an extension and Rustschman needs to be dealt by the trade deadline and he’s blocked at catcher and first base and will never sign here.

A left side of the infield with Witt at short and Gunnar Henderson at third would have been something. This points to Elias’s future draft mistakes and was a portal into a mind totally ill-equipped to build Major League rosters. He stayed away from arms in that first draft, which would be telling. He also squatted on Rutschman too long in the minors and that was a portal into his lack of passion and urgency and feel that would forever plague his front office as well.

Horrible Player Development

Other organizations are laughing about Elias’s inability to produce position players when that’s all he’s invested in. He’s got Cal Ripken, Jr. trying to fix it for him now, nearly a decade into rot. His MLB product has been bush league three years running in the field and on the base paths and with situational hitting.

His most talented players have endured slumps that go on a year or longer. No one is an expert at any position. Launch-angle obsession is rotting his entire minor league org. And he promoted the people with boots on the ground who implemented and continue to this madness on a daily basis (nobody misses Matt Blood in Texas, I’ll leave it at that)

They have one player to show from nearly a decade in the international market – Samuel Basallo. And Elias is so out of his depth and so disconnected from the human side of the game and communication that he has his latest puppet skipper take aim trying to shame that kid in public, while pretending that Gunnar Henderson and Rutschman haven’t been embarrassing themselves and the franchise.

No Feel For Pitching

Dude just can’t evaluate it. Doesn’t really value it. Thinks he can win without it. Only really prized it in one draft – 2023 – and damn is that looking shaky already. His major league decisions have been laughable – trading for Cole Irvin, Tomo Sugano, Fuji, Chris Bassitt, Craig Kimbrel, Ryan Helsley, Kyle Gibson (the second time), Charlie Morton.

I am only putting this so low, because maybe, maybe, if he had a clue with position players and actually could have developed bats with elite ball-to-bat and swing-decision skills, then maybe it could have worked with this approach to pitching.

One real arm he ever got, Corbin Burnes, he only wanted to rent (Burnes told you as much despite what Elias tried to launder through the usual suspects in the media).The most impactful home-grown arm that he brought in from the ground floor is Brandon Young, this year.

Utterly Unable To Improve Roster In-Season

Picking up Aaron Hicks for nothing with the Yankees basically paying his salary is the only time he markedly made his team better at a critical spot in season. In the entire time he’s been here. That’s impossible, but true.

The unforced errors and lack of any feel for what a young team needed and the role of veteran leadership and proven on-base skills, he just never got it and never will. So much idiocy with Eloy Jimenez and Austin Slater and Greg Soto and Fuki and firggin Jack Flaherty when his team had a chance to win it all with the AL East in a very down year.

It would make you laugh if it wasn’t so sad. He’d rather save his owner money and pad those stupid prospect rankings and show ownership he can ball on a budget. He’d rather be proven smart than simply try to win RIGHT NOW.

And his buddy Sig is a notorious prospect hugger, too, and there are no checks and balances in that front office so you get eight years of the same mistakes. They never sell high on anyone and won’t be doing that this deadline, either.

He Butchered The Ballpark

Listening to Elias and his flunky sidekick (Sig Mejdal) gloat about knowing better how to correct Camden Yards left field better “than any third party” only to totally embarrass themselves is really something. The video is priceless. You can watch it on “The Daily Flock Show.”

Of course they were overly impressed with themselves and fancy themselves geniuses and they made changes that helped the opposition more than the Orioles, and then tried it before the start of last season. And it still hasn’t work, with a front office totally beholden to launch angle and power – and that has no clue with pitching – alter a park that created a massive home run deficit for right-handed hitters in their own ball park vs the opposition.

Clown decision, bros.

Wrecked The Medical Team

Elias inherited one of the best medical teams and trainers and rehab guys in MLB with a proven track record and part of the reason this team got better faster than Elias thought they would (like he was explaining on Aug. 8, 2022), is because they were incredibly healthy.

But they weren’t HIS people and they did things different ways in the past here. Mikey doesn’t like that. So he chucked them out along the way with his various power grabs and the Orioles have been joke in this regard for several years running. Key players not hitting the team’s timelines to return, pushing back surgeries, repeated injuries, Adley straining both obliques, a plague of soft tissues issues.

Alas, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

Which is why we got this, too, back on that fatefiul Aug 8: "This is a decade-long window that I think is opening up, and I couldn't be excited about it for Baltimore and for the Orioles."

How about the nerve of this guy?

That’s The Elias Way. That’s why we’ve been here so many times before at the break. And we’re back here now. And nothing will actually be exciting again, for the Orioles future, until they fire Elias and gut his baseball operations department.

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