Orioles Boss Mike Elias Fired Exec Matt Blood Months After Promoting Him. Likely To Save Himself

There was always going to be reckoning of some sort with the Baltimore Orioles spiraling since June 21, 2024, a span of two-and-a-half seasons, and failing to meet their own expectations.

It was always unlikely to include the man most responsible for the eight-year rebuild and total disaster, failed baseball czar Mike Elias.

And with the firing of former longtime farm director Matt Blood (first reported by The Baltimore Banner), one of about 20 people in baseball operations who got fancy new titles and promotions before the start another lost season, it’s looking to many in the industry like Elias will throw several former top aides overboard to save himself. Private equity billionaire owner David Rubenstein made it perfectly clear before the trade deadline - when he knew the team would be selling - and went overbaord and backed Elias anyway. Believe him until given any reason otherwise. I certainly do.

He thinks Elias was the man for this job. And as they rearrange human deck chairs on the Baseball Titanic this first detail to emerge is likely further indication.

In covering pro sports for 30 years – across all sports – if someone with Elias’s tenure here, and with him having just receiving a covert extension and promotion himself not that long ago to trump what the Bloods of the work make, was going to get fired, he’d be the first to go. If he hadn’t already brokered a new future with ownership – one we can only hope includes a team president with a baseball background hired above him, and that vacant general manger position staffed by that team president to check Elias on a daily basis – he’d be gone.

If ownership was planning an immediate future free of this overmatched, numbers-obsessed charlatan, then they would let whomever is replacing him sort through the carnage of what’s left in The Warehouse and decide who can stay. And who must go. It wouldn’t be going down this way, with the team refusing to comment on a firing that is now widely known around baseball.

We've seen multiple GM firings in-season already, including an Astros team that is going to win the AL West. If Elias was gone, the people I've talked to think he'd be gone already.

But doing it that way – shedding The Elias Way for good, well, that would have been hard. That’s tedious work, and requires engaged ownership that had a clue and cared about winning and was willing to do the digging and hustling to try to find the best and the brightest while at the same time trying to break the union in the upcoming lockout. … Oh yeah, and they’d have to eat a ton of salary because most of these folks around here were going backwards or nowhere in this industry so Rubenstein would be on the hook for a big nut to pay them to go away.

He ain’t about that. Especially not after Elias just cost him $5M on outfielder Luis Robert Jr., who was clearly hobbled and probably didn’t want to be here. This way is much easier and Elias can pretend his cronies (HE JUST PROMOTED 16 OF THEM!) – who were largely subservient and obsequious, just like his pathetic managers – were the ones messing up his master plans. He will try to sell you that he is making real changes and you’ll hear more baloney about self-scouting and soul-searching (impossible!) and other moves will follow.

Cosmetic Surgery When They Need A Brain Transplant

Again, unless this restructuring includes massive checks and balances on Elias’s power over the roster and over the front office personnel, nothing is ever changing here (like hiring three puppet skippers). The real buzz in rival front offices, according to league sources, is whether Elias is also parting with his right-hand man Sig Mejdal, who goes way back with him, is as guilty of Birdland being in this mess as anyone not named Elias and is also stubborn and sophomoric and fancies himself a baseball genius (oh, and has negative people skills).

This is where it could get a little juicy.

As we hear it, Elias has been calling around to other front offices and well, probably fishing for compliments, but asking what people he respects think of his roster and his baseball operations and how his rebuild turned into an endless tankjob for top-10 draft picks. And, well, Sig isn’t all that well liked, so some of that feedback might come into play.

As for Blood, one league source told me weeks ago that people with the Rangers, where Blood came from before Elias hired him, were astonished by his promotions and the power he assumed here. One baseball lifer who remains very plugged in with people around the league said, “Probably already a little out of his depth just running a minor league operation.”

Oh well. Eventually the truth hits (almost) everybody.

Blood, like the rest of them, let their prospect rankings and initial success and the 2023 season go to their heads. They thought they had gamed the system (MLB literally changed to a lottery system because of these jokers) and had secret sauce drafting college bats high and opening “a 10-year window to compete to win the AL East,” as Elias once smugly uttered.

Now they look like failures, because they are failures. And The Warehouse has one less failure doing more than they ever should have been charged with in the first place. With more soon to go. Just not The Head Failure In Charge.

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