Orioles Failures To Develop Top Picks Makes Decision To Fire BJ Surhoff Even Sillier Over Time

Of all the callous and sophomoric and arrogant decisions baseball failure Mike Elias has made since taking over control of the Orioles in 2019, running off BJ Surhoff rarely gets mentioned, obscured by nearly a decade of development and evaluation blunders.

But it’s resonated to this day, and perhaps now more than ever.

As the team’s sweeping mistakes turning first-overall picks into close to type of impactful major leaguers they should be has made them an industry laughingstock HYPER, with another lost season ended, another former Orioles Hall of Famer, Mike Bordick, brought up how Elias mishandled Suhoff on “The Daily Flock Show” this week.

After years of their top-rated prospects faltering and stumbling mightily at the MLB level and suffering clearly to produce under pressure and execute in the clutch and to handle the mental burden that comes with those expectations, it makes Elias’s zest to gut Baltimore’s baseball operations staff of holdovers like Surhoff seem even more juvenile and counter-intuitive all these years later as a never-ending rebuild rages on.

At a time when they already peddled catcher Adley Rutschman, the first player Elias ever selected and the top pick in the 2019 draft over superstar Bobby Witt, for a bunch of teenagers at the trade deadline, and with Jackson Holliday, another first-overall pick, the subject of trade talks and a strong candidate to be dealt this winter, it makes the quick firing of Surhoff, who resided in Baltimore and had a strong presence in community activism for special needs children among other causes, seem even more ridiculous in retrospect (he was among many holdovers let go in 2019).

What A Resource, Wasted

Surhoff had a background that could have made him a true beacon for the rebuild. He was the first-overall pick by the Brewers in 1985 out of North Carolina as a catcher, he reached the majors in 1987, at age 22, as a starting catcher, but surely he had nothing to offer Rutschman as every part of his game spiraled. He later moved to the infield and then the outfield, and would have been quite a resource for Holliday as he has struggled to find any position and might need to try to move to the outfield to salvage his career.

Those two – Rutschman and Holliday - never came close to fulfilling the hype Elias put on them, while second-overall pick Heston Kjerstad hasn’t even had an MLB career and will be 28 at the start of spring training and fifth-overall pick Colton Cowser has abundant athleticism but is a fourth outfielder at best.

“There is a lot of pressure on a 1-1 for sure,” Bordick told me, “and I’ll go back in time and question what I think was one of Mike Elias’s worst decisions. He had a guy in player development back when he first came on named BJ Surhoff that was a 1-1, and the Orioles were lined up and already said they were just going to tank. So they had 1-1s lined up down the road, and BJ was not only a catcher as a 1 1, but then he was third baseman and an outfielder.

“I don’t know that you can get a more well rounded 1-1 with a borderline Hall Of Fame career and then tell him to hit the road with no reason other than he’s a ‘baseball guy,’ and not an ‘analytics guy.’ The impact BJ Surhoff would have had alone on this young group of players would have been game changing. Game changing.

“Not only would he have been able to evaluate, but he would have been able to help them handle this incredible amount of pressure and understand what they had to do to become great pros. And they would have learned it through the minor leagues and they would have been better able to handle the pressure at the highest level.”

Surhoff played nearly 20 years in MLB, hit over 400 doubles, had a career average of .282 and reached base 33% of the time. But to Elias, he wasn’t into numbers enough and had to go. Shameful display from Elias and an early indication of what was to come.

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