When Mike Elias "Buys" At The Trade Deadline The Joke Is Always On The Orioles

Mike Elias is threatening to buy again at the trade deadline, a proposition that is mostly a transparent sales job trying to peddle tickets to a bad product in the late summer, but one that will scare smart Orioles fans nonetheless.

Beware the access-merchants and sycophants in the media espousing this path, by the way (the kind who would pretend Adley Rutschman shouldn’t even be listed among the top 100 trade candidates), because they aren’t after the truth. They are happy chronicling the warped and dystopian version of the truth Elias loves to launder. Helps both their job security and his, it seems; symbiotic gaslighting!

But the larger reality is, you can best judge what Elias would do as a buyer through the prism of his core beliefs at the deadline – prospect hugging, half-assed trades, trying to look smart and preserve a non-existent “decade-long window” to win the AL East when he’s been in this position before. And despite having a better team on his hands in 2022, 2023 and 2024 than the 2026 model, and despite having a markedly better hand to play in terms of top prospects (yet to fall victim to Baltimore’s cursed player development) back then, the incompetent baseball czar saved some of his nastiest work for those most pivotal occasions to buy.

He is less fit to be a true GM in-season than he even is during the offseason, and if you think his core beliefs and true self has changed even one bit, you must have completely ignored the first 98 games of this season with overmatched puppet skipper 3.0 helping to run another team into the ground.

The first time Elias could have helped out a team with playoff potential, in 2022, he dealt Trey Mancini and Jorge Lopez – which I didn’t have a problem with at the time and still don’t. But he sold you the two primary arms he got in return – starters Cade Povich (Twins) and Chase McDermott (Astros) – as key pieces for the MLB team sooner rather than later and patted himself on the back for landing “a possible front-of-the-rotation starter,” in Povich when he met the media on Aug 8, 2022 (the day he pronounced “liftoff”).

As for McDermott, well, maybe the Dodgers will turn him into the latest interesting relief arm Elias could not develop and gave away.

Sadly, Birdland, it only got worse from there.

2023 Deadline

Record at All-Star break: 54 – 35 (2 GB)

Adds: SP Jack Flaherty (4 minor leaguers): 1-3, 6.75, 1.67 WHIP, 7 HRs

RP Shintaro Fujinami (Easton Lucas): 4.85 ERA, 15 W, 2 HBP in 29 2/3 IP

This was a total joke and slap in the face to the clubhouse and fanbase, as I called out literally in realtime on the radio. This was the moment I knew they would never win with this utter fool and complete egomaniac in charge.

Elias barely got Flaherty (“General Soreness” as I dubbed him for already ducking starts shortly after he got here) right before the cutoff to complete trades and he clearly wasn’t motivated to do much. Thinks, as always, he has all the answers in his system, and the easy part is just folding them in and watching all those wins manifest.

Those statistics above are what these two provided to the pennant run. Flaherty was already in the pen in September warming up for mop-up relief duty in vital games against the Rays with the division on the line. And Fuji was making a mockery out of throwing strikes yet constantly being given high-leverage spots for puppet skipper 1.0 (overmatched Brandon Hyde) because his boss (Elias) mandated it.

Plenty in the media carried water for this charade; an afront to a roster with the potential to win. Wasn’t cute or funny then, and sure as hell ain’t now when in hindsight this was the best chance to ever win a playoff game with these charlatans in charge.

It was embarrassing watching Fuji walk and hit guys and give up all kinds of loud contract. Flaherty at least found a few more teams to take on his act (he failed them aside from the Dodgers). In 2025 I was moving my daughter up to college and my youngest son and I went to a Syracuse Mets game; Fuji was pitching in middle relief, where he had been all season (AAA). He would never pitch in the majors again.

“We’re gonna really stretch and reach to help this really good 2023 team, if we get within arm’s reach of something” Elias told you before the trade deadline.

And this is what you got.

2024 Deadline

Record at ASB: 58-38 (1st)

Adds: SP Zach Eflin (3 minor leaguers): 5-2, 2.60 ERA

SP Trevor Rogers (Kyle Stowers): 4 GS, 7.11 ERA, 25 H, 10 W, 19 IP

Stowers was the best everyday outfielder Elias ever drafted (even if he wasn’t a top five pick or close to it) and he was tailor made for OPCY, even after they butchered it twice, and they dealt him and Connor Norby for Rogers, who choked up four of the most pathetic outings you will ever see before being sent to AAA until late May the following year.

Not only did he not help the team, he actively hurt it and was shattered at the time they got him and was the fifth or sixth best pitching option on that Miami roster. He never gave them anything until the 2025 season had already collapsed and they fired Hyde, and then stunk again in 2026 until that season, too, collapsed. And he needs to be gone by this deadline as a pending free agent.

Eflin was starting to come undone physically and the Rays knew it and couldn’t wait to peddle that $19M he was owed for 2025; when he made 14 starts with the 5.93 ERA and allowed 88 hits in 71 1/3 IP before he was shelved. Elias, being in the Saving Face business and not the Winning In October business, then tripled down on the broken pitcher this offseason with a broken medical staff and wasted more money on him.

RP Gregory Soto (2 minor leaguers): 5.09 ERA, 1.50 WHIP

RP Seranthony Dominguez (Austin Hays): 3.97 ERA, 5.33 FIP, 99 ERA+

If you watched the Phillies play at all, you knew these two relivers were really suffering and OPCY wouldn’t play well for them. Philly viewed them as addition by subtraction and, like in the above trades, the prospects and quasi-prospects Elias moved didn’t turn out to be much, but then again almost no one he’s ever had in his system has become much, here or elsewhere.

These two immediately began blowing 8th and 9th innings here, and Elias couldn’t wait to make them part of the purge of 2025, right around this time last year, gone for middling prospects in a middling farm system.

DH Eloy Jimenez (minor leaguer): 100 PA, 1 HR 7 RBI, .270 OBP, .586 OPS

OF Austin Slater (PTBNL): 79 PA, 1 HR 6 RBI, .675 OPS

This team desperately needed someone to give it what Aaron Hicks gave the 2023 club – proven playoff pedigree, quality ABs seeing a ton of pitches, top OBP with some pop. Instead they got a guy who didn’t belong on an MLB roster and one who is the perennial 25th man, while moving a bat in Hays who at least could hit lefties.

They threw a parade in the South Side of Chicago when Jimenez, totally broken and hitting nothing but groundballs, was gone. Positionless and inept at the plate to render being a DH moot, they still ran him out there all the time … because they want to be right and they want to look smart and if they win a little along the way, that’s okay too.

The clubhouse saw what a fraud this was. Jimenez, like Fuji, never appeared in MLB again (I did get to see him DH in Durham the following year, much like Fuji). Oh, and even though Elias helped explain away this deadline grift by proclaiming Jackson Holliday and Coby Mayo would be “big contributors” to this fake postseason run, Mayo was blocked by Jimenez and we still don’t know what those two really are.

You can’t make this stuff up with these clowns in charge.

“The roster is very fortified,” Elias said after this nightmare of a deadline. “We have an excellent team … We did what we needed to do to give this team the support it deserves.”

When does this end? Will this ownership group ever pay attention? Do they care?

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