The Orioles Still Cannot Hit Offspeed Pitches. Mike Elias Is Only Making The Problem Worse

The Orioles have systemic failures and rot that have upended a rebuild predicated on them having an elite hitting incubator, since they’ve invested almost nothing in pitching through any avenue.

Failed baseball czar Mike Elias believed he was so smart and so ahead of the curve that he would produce masher after masher. So he leaned into certain types and traits – clearly dictated by his flawed and backwards computer models – which bore out through failed draft after failed draft – HYOER, with a clueless player development and hitting infrastructure at the MLB level further undermining it all.

It’s truly the perfect storm of sophomoric ego and hubris, fostered by a lack of old-school common sense with no checks and balances. This franchise is beholden to a strata that undermined scouts in place of data. So if you are wondering why Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson could suffer from year-long slumps and why the next wave (Heston Kjerstad, Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo, Colton Cowser) have faltered, there is commonality in their profiles and shocking failures in Baltimore’s internal hit apparatus that has fueled the complete collapse of their never-ending rebuild.

As we dug into the depths of Cowser’s struggles, including an inability to make any adjustments to offspeed pitches, it served as a portal into a much bigger problem. And it’s a massive hole that Elias has only made deeper by continuing to add outside players with a brutally similar profile to make the lives of advance scouts facing the Orioles remarkably easy. A fraud GM who actually had the gall to claim they’d compete to win the AL East for a “decade long window. ” keeps falling for the same guy, over and over and over again.

Simply put, almost no on this team the last two years can hit offspeed pitches, it’s only getting worse, and a remarkable amount of veterans Elias either held on to far too long (Cedric Mullins, Ryan Mountcastle, Anthony Santander, Ramon Urias) or sought to acquire to help along the way (Adam Frazier, Leody Taveras, Jeremiah Jackson, Eloy Jimenez, Austin Slater, Ramon Laureano) and once top prospects he shipped elsewhere (Joey Ortiz, Connor Norby) are among the worst hitters in MLB the last three years making contact and getting on base safely vs offspeed pitches.

This isn’t a blip or a coincidence … It’s a bizarre fixation, a remarkably odd kink, the worst kind of fetish possible when you only want to draft and pay for a certain kind of bat, and so many carry the same dominant wart and holes. It’s part of why they are hardwired to fail under Elias and will never come close to winning with him and his minions in charge.

Damning Data, Numbing Numbers

There are seven Orioles outside the top 175 hitters in MLB vs offspeed pitches in wOBA (with at least 150 pat appearances), this season using baseballsavant.com data.

Colton Cowser (265) 289 wOBA 34% whiff

Jeremiah Jackson (257) .289 23%

Coby Mayo (250) .291 32%

Tyler O’Neill (235) .296 31%

Leody Taveras (207) .300 26%

Gunnar Henderson (204) .306 24%

Jackson Holliday (175) .313 31%

Last year, over the full season, there were nine batters who players at least quasi-regularly who finished outside the top 200 in wOBA vs offspeed pitches, including Rutschman at .298 (a key development in his steady decline at the plate) and Mullins and, no surprise that Elias thought he was the guy who could fix former top-50 prospect Dylan Carlson … Carlson was 305th in MLB last season with a .273 wOBA vs offspeed pitching.

Why has Henderson fallen off so dramatically, besides leaning even more into pullside power above all else and trying to swing for the fences? He’s fallen off dramatically against offspeed stuff. And, why did Kyle Stowers go from throw-in (with Norby the key name) to Miami for Trevor Rogers to All Star in 2025?

Well, he never got to play regularly here and was jerked around and sent down whenever he did get going, but he also was as bad as any qualified hitter against offspeed pitches in 2024 (.265 wOBA). He gets to the Marlins and is top 11 in all of MLB in that regard in 2025, making real adjustments and getting quality feedback and work with a legit front office (with a GM who came from Tampa where they excel at just this).

To call Elias a fraud is to sully mere commonplace frauds. He is a MEGA FRAUD.

What Happens When They Don’t Throw A Fastball?

Unfortunately for Elias, the league knows what a clownshow this is with a manager utterly out of his depth and a shoddy coaching staff, so these hitters don’t get fed fastballs. Increasingly teams have even their least efficient starters rely on curveballs and sliders and change ups against the Orioles (even when their fastball velo isn’t what you would expect it to would have to be to make the change actually play).

Here’s what the Orioles have done against those three pitches the last two years:

2026 2025

Curveball: .545 OPS (28th) .627 OPS (16th)

wRC+ 65 84

Change-up: .600 OPS (19th) .583 OPS (23rd)

wRC+ 79 73

Slider: .640 OPS (18th) .643 OPS (20th)

wRC+ 92 89

If they can get ahead and a pitcher has egregious control and they work into fastball counts, then they can do some damage. But for a team that chose a direct path of hitting over pitching to be getting bailed out by an over-performing rotation to hang around the periphery of the wild card “race,” while literally all of their homegrown bats suffer save for Samuel Basallo, it speaks to fissures and failures well beyond what these 20-somethings themselves deserve blame for.

They aren’t absolved by any means, but this is clearly a front office bereft of adjustments that believes coddling and enabling will eventually work. So we get excuses instead of acknowledgement; regress over progress. Soon enough more of these fallen prospects will move on and most will have proven to be over-drafted/under-developed to the point they are damaged goods.

But Stowers won’t be the only one to make good when he finally got in the hands of people who knew what they were doing. There’s some light elsewhere. Only darkness in Birdland as long as Elias is in charge.

Subscribe On YouTube For The Best Orioles Coverage:

Add us as a preferred source on Google