The Orioles Keeping Disliked Baseball Exec Sig Mejdal, And Firing The Bird, Says Everything About These Owners

Ownership gutting low-level employees ahead of an expected lockout, merely "re-assigning" Mejdal, keeping his boss Mike Elias, is beyond a bad look

Jun 26, 2026; Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Oriole Bird before the game against the Washington Nationals at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Mandatory Credit: Lexi Thompson-Imagn Images | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The feckless billionaires who run the Baltimore Orioles are okay with laying off the mascot and the guy who runs their bleacher gimmick with the water hose – who aren’t even getting benefits and aren’t even really full-time employees – while overpriced failure executive Mike Elias stays in charge with his henchman, Sig Mejdal, on staff in an allegedly different capacity.

If this isn’t private equity run amuck, nothing is.

The O’s gutting various departments throughout their org on the heels of another sub-.500 season with dwindling attendance and hiding behind an incoming lockout is not surprising at all. Using this fiasco to sweep aside hardworking people who are far better ambassadors for this decaying brand than angry dugout puppet Craig Albernaz will ever be, while propping up charlatans who think like they do is not surprising in the least.

Keeping the people most responsible for running this franchise into the ground on the baseball side – which obviously permeates into everything else – is a striking indication of how unserious owner David Rubenstein is, no matter how many books he wants to write about himself. And the decision to retain Majdal, in a different role or not, is the biggest indicator yet throughout MLB that the vacant GM opening isn’t really a GM opening and that Elias isn’t really changing anything of significance, because he managed to keep his No. 1 sidekick and enabler employed with a big title.

Elias had an opportunity to recast the organization and do far more than chuck aside overpromoted and overmatched player development honcho Matt Blood, but we’ve had enough time for the dust to settle for the industry to see this for what it is, and no one we’re reaching out to believes anything truly is going to be altered about how Elias operates and who he takes his closest counsel from.

“There has to be a humility and emotional intelligence and a willingness to hire people who will challenge you,” longtime baseball analyst Kyle Glaser said on “The Daily Flock” this week. “That is a security thing. You have to be secure enough as a leader to hire someone with 35 years of experience who will tell you when you’re wrong. That’s what the most successful organizations do …

“If they are truly serious about improving, they need to find someone who is highly thought of in the game but comes from a very different school of thought than they do in terms of payer development processes and coaching processes and hiring processes … At a bare minimum, they need someone with that difference of opinion in the room.”

Buck Showalter, as invested in seeing this franchise thrive as ever, would be that perfect antidote. And removing Mejdal and creating a role for someone like that would have been an ideal way to start to do it, and none of that is happening or will happen until Elias is fired.

Sig Stays, Bird Goes

Pushing Blood out and keeping Mejdal in a prominent role was a massive indicator of how cosmetic these alterations will be. Elias and Mejdal go all the way back to their roots , they are thick as thieves and they both truly believe they are baseball geniuses and eventually luck will just be on their side to prove them right. Not using this as a chance to restructure the organization and allow for far greater checks and balances ensures future failure.

No one is buying that the Orioles are going to do more here than hire a few different underlings and reprogram their super computer to value certain numeric traits more than did before in its algorithm and devalue others. That passes for introspection and soul-searching in The Warehouse. Because as Elias called around begging for compliments from other GMs about his roster building and soliciting opinions of his org, ain't no way he was hearing endorsements for his boy Sig.

“You can find people with positive things to say about (Elias); not glowing, but positive,” Glaser said. “I can only speak for myself in 10 years as a national writer, I have had a much more difficult time finding people who will say things about Sig in a positive light. Again that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I have had a very hard time finding them.

“And I think right now, if you are the Orioles, you have to look at how much power was given to Sig and others in the organization, and where this has brought them … And it doesn’t mean every opinion he holds is invalid, but maybe you need to deemphasize his opinion in some areas where he has not proven to be the expert he was purported to be, while still valuing his opinions in other areas.”

Or the owners could just stay in hiding and fire The Bird while they’re at it.

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