Mike Elias's Injury Excuses Don't Hold Up: The 2026 Orioles Were Healthy, They Just Stunk

There is a fine line between gaslighting and lying.

But when a proven baseball failure has been on the job since 2018 and he makes a point to obfuscate and mislead with gross regularity in a shallow attempt to function as an extension of the marketing department to convince fans to keep spending on his product, it’s unseemly to say the least.

It was actually surprising it took a several minutes into his end-of-season press conference before said over-empowered failure – Orioles top exec Mike Elias – began to whisper about injuries that really had very little to do with his team falling 20 games off the pace the AL East for the second straight year amid what he proclaimed would be a “decade long window to compete at the top of the American League East.”

When you don't bother to construct teams to feign winning is the objective, and you toil for private equity billionaires who have made it abundantly clear that winning isn’t even on the radar (beyond aiming to spend the least amount possible to maybe fall into the final Wild Card spot in a watered-down field), then shameful press conferences like Monday become the predictable norm. And when probed about the stark lack of development from virtually every key prospect in this system for years, after whining about injuries all season, we got a portal into how this feeble man thinks.

"We've also had a lot of health factors in some of that regression," he said of the most probing question facing his woeful regime. Then we got the following, "it's really hard to stay healthy as a player nowadays."

Shifting narratives and moving goal posts and whining about faux problems and ignoring the many very real ones we know would undermine Team Elias yet again = The Elias Way. And most of the media peddles it with no reporting or perspective or pushback. There is plenty of loser talk and alternative facts that Elias and his puppet manager, Craig Albernaz, spewed all season long and this injury/health nonsense ends now.

"We've been getting killed by injuries the last few years," Elias cried. It's amazing he hasn't been fired yet.

Just The Facts

The Orioles finished 12th in MLB salary lost (per spotrac.com who do excellent work tracking this across MLB); the vast majority of it was on players who had significant injuries before the season began or were massive injury risks the moment they were signed (declining closer Ryan Helsley of the 15 innings pitched and aged starters Chris Bassitt and Zach Eflin). In terms of days lost to Injured List stints, the gross number of nearly 2000 is misleading because it was almost entirely fringy or guys who came into the year with Elias having ample time to prepare for their upcoming absence.

So despite what Elias is trying to sell you and despite the baloney owner David Rubenstein spewed before the trade deadline, let’s keep it real:

Orioles 15-day IL stints (14): T-15th in MLB

Orioles Top 5 leaders in PA days lost to IL: 0

Orioles Top 9 in OPS leaders days lost to IL: 133

Orioles Top 4 SP (Trevor Rogers, Kyle Bradish, Shane Baz, Brandon Young) days lost to IL: 31 (and half in final two weeks when Bradish should’ve been shutdown anyway).

Orioles To Appear on 60-Day IL: Helsley, Bassitt, Eflin, Felix Bautista, Ryan Mountcastle, Dean Kremer, Keegan Akin, Colin Selby, Yaramil Hiraldo

Mountcastle had no role on the team to begin with, had been hurt for years and has 15 PAs. Bautista was never expected to contribute after requiring major shoulder surgery late last summer while coming off Tommy John, Akin has been terrible as even a lefty/lefty guy, Kremer was peddled for an 18-year old at the trade deadline and Selby and Hiraldo are Selby and Hiraldo.

Stop it. Stop saying this stuff out loud Mike. You sound like a feckless coward.

More Reality; Less Alternative Facts

So, of the $46.2M the Orioles lost to IL stints this season, when you see where over $40M of it comes from right off the top, you begin to see just how deceitful these men are willing to be to stay employed. Because where $41M went (if you include the silly waiver claim of already-injured Luis Robert Jr. per Spotrac) includes no surprises:

Helsley: $10.3M Kremer: $2.2M

Bassitt: $6.8M Bautista: $2.1M

Mountcastle: $6.1M Akin: $2.0M

Eflin: $4.8M Adley Rutschman: $1.6M

Tyler O’Neill: $4.5M Andrew Kittredge: $1.4

Helsley’s fastball was destroyed in 2025 and he carried major risk at signing. O’Neill is almost always hurt and has been for years, which is why he didn’t opt out of this ridiculous, $19M/year deal in the first place. Kittredge has had varied medical issues because all 36-year-old relievers do.

And we have chronicled in depth how broken-down Rutschman had become and how they couldn’t fix him or catch him and they peddled him for a bunch of (basically) teenagers at the deadline.

So this doomed your season, Mike? Get out of here.

How about the days lost to injury, Mike. Like you don’t know these numbers yourself (it’s okay, they fired Matt Blood, who never should have been promoted in the first place, and re-arranged middle managers, everything is fine now!)

Here’s where 72% of their man-days lost on the IL went (over 1400 of the 1971 days):

Selby: 187 Helsley: 138

Jordan Westburg: 187 Akin: 123

Eflin: 180 Hiraldo: 100

Bautista: 178 Kremer: 72

Mountcastle: 168 Bassitt: 70

We covered most of these guys and Westburg is another oft-injured player they’ve messed with regarding when he should and shouldn’t get surgery and he had a serious elbow injury before spring training even began and they had ample time to prepare and he still ended up getting delayed Tommy John surgery anyway. Elias fired an elite training staff that wasn’t totally under his thumb, I guess, so he could bring in his own people … Yet still he whines about injuries.

So, what about of the guys who actually played?

Breakdown By Position Group

Well, the strength of the team was the bullpen, Hesley stunk and couldn’t throw strikes on the rare occasions he actually pitched (they are stuck him in 2027 because Elias is a fool) and we knew Bautista wasn’t going to throw and of the guys Albernaz favored in late-inning spots, Yennie Cano and Rico Garcia and Kittredge and Tyler Wells (before trading him) and Josh Walker and Anthony Nunez and Alex Hoppe combined for … wait for it … 30 days, all Kittredge, all early in the season.

We already covered the starting pitching. Of the not-over-the-hill guys and Kremer (who started the year in AAA!) it amounts to 16 days of Rogers out early in season (Bradish’s innings were alarming before the hernia at the very end). Good luck duplicating that, as a staff no one much fancied carried Elias's pathetic lineup to a near .500 finish.

How about the guys who compromised those silly lineups Elias and his flunky sidekick rolled out there night after night? Well of the guys who had at least 16 plate appearances, here is days lost to IL leaders:

Jackson Holliday: 67 Blaze Alexander: 65

Heston Kjerstad: 64 Dylan Beavers: 48

Rutschman: 43 Samuel Basallo: 35

So it’s a AAA (to this point) worthy second baseman who also was hurt before spring training began in Holliday, who also has no real future here. And a fringy utility guy in Alexander who had an amazing run for a few months but was expected to be a bench piece.

Beavers was in his rookie season and expected to be a platoon guy, Kjerstad is a AAA guy they took second-overall who ended up behind Rece Hinds and Christian Franklin on their internal depth chart. And an overrated catcher who we told you would never play that much to begin with, and who would be dealt at the deadline of course was on the IL a bunch. And a 21-year-old rookie catcher who was run into the ground to preserve Adley and who they shamed when he was hurt and who clearly played through a shoulder problem and fell apart in the second half when the season was basically over.

That’s your injury-marred season. What a load of crap.

(They can peddle their Gunnar Henderson post-script narratives elsewhere and plenty in the local media will launder that for them. They tried it with Adley when they broke him two years ago. This season was a joke and if they didn’t shut Gunnar down and still let him bat first or second or third every day while he sulked and failed, that’s on all of them. Own it).

The fact they are willing to repeat this fake talking point so freely throughout at all parts of this joke season shows how duplicitous and untrustworthy they really are. The reality of the 2026 Orioles is they were remarkably healthy and ridiculously lucky and still stunk because they were constructed to stink by a fraud.

They won’t be this fortunate next year, because baseball doesn’t work that way, and they will be worse.

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