{"id":204949,"date":"2025-10-06T12:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/204949\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T12:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:13:08","slug":"baltimore-orioles-what-really-matters-about-mike-elias-offseason-goal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/204949\/","title":{"rendered":"Baltimore Orioles: What really matters about Mike Elias\u2019 offseason goal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twice last Monday, Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias said<\/a> the offseason goal is to enter spring training with a club that can compete for the AL East title \u2014 an aim so simple and modest that it required clarification that a World Series was also the goal.<\/p>\n

They feel one and the same to me \u2014 to be projected at or near the top of a division with three playoff teams would easily put the Orioles in the top handful of clubs in the American League, and that\u2019s a good place to start. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not necessarily the measuring stick but who will be doing the measuring that has stuck with me since then. <\/p>\n

Elias said the goal is to have a team \u201cwhere we like the way it looks, Baltimore likes the way it looks, the American League East and the baseball world is excited about that team, and it\u2019s a group of players that we say \u2026 we\u2019re going to be right in the hunt for the division title.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s \u2026 you? Me? The national baseball media? The die-hard Birdland Members and the anti-Elias Blue Check Brigade? <\/p>\n

Elias\u2019 Orioles just finished a dispiriting 87-loss season, one in which the club\u2019s offseason of short-term deals and stopgap measures caught much of the blame and during which much of their homegrown group of hitters underperformed and left questions about their future contributions. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to take a big, impactful offseason for the fan base and baseball world to feel this is a playoff team again. Elias has to know that \u2014 and I\u2019m not sure he\u2019d have mentioned those perspectives if he wasn\u2019t ready to satisfy them.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for him, the starting point is going to be higher with the group that\u2019s here just based on the assumption, albeit flimsy, of the rotation\u2019s health and an offseason of fixing their homegrown hitters. But even the cheeriest of optimists wouldn\u2019t think those alone are getting this team 15 to 20 more wins.<\/p>\n

For the baseball world to think this team is a division contender, in a winter when the Red Sox, Yankees and Blue Jays will all likely be swinging big to bolster rosters that are already playoff worthy, Elias is going to have to make those types of moves himself. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s basically one such instance in the six offseasons he has presided over this club: the February 2024 trade for Corbin Burnes<\/a>. They spent often but, other than Tyler O\u2019Neill\u2019s three-year deal<\/a>, spent incrementally last year in signing a lot of major league free agents to one-year deals whose returns were, as Elias put it, \u201cmore mixed than we would want.\u201d <\/p>\n

He would point out that the Ram\u00f3n Laureano signing<\/a> turned out to be a good one and wasn\u2019t a splashy acquisition in the slightest, but every team \u2014 the Orioles included \u2014 should be trying to find value like that, and their big moves shouldn\u2019t preclude that.<\/p>\n

\"Baltimore<\/p>\n

Ram\u00f3n Laureano was not a splashy acquistion last offseason, but he paid off for the Orioles before they traded him to San Diego. (Ulysses Mu\u00f1oz\/The Banner)<\/p>\n

So in this Orioles offseason there\u2019s room for it all: those opportunistic signings and the impactful ones that change the conversation about a team. I see three areas in particular where the Orioles can meet that threshold. <\/p>\n

One is in, as Elias put it, the front half of the rotation. In Kyle Bradish<\/a> and Trevor Rogers<\/a> you have two very good pitchers who you hope will be so for the entire season next year. Grayson Rodriguez was meant to join them in the top half of the rotation but hasn\u2019t been on a major league mound since July 2024. The Orioles need 180 high-quality innings they can write in pen at the top of the rotation so that the group is even more formidable.<\/p>\n

The second is in the lineup with a proven veteran who can take pressure off the homegrown hitters, who have clearly bent under the weight of it over these last two years. Center field seems like a spot for that, but the Orioles can get creative with playing time if they deem an infielder a good fit. <\/p>\n

And last is a lockdown reliever who can add experience to a group that will be missing F\u00e9lix Bautista<\/a>. Perhaps more important, such a pitcher would take the scrutiny off the fact that they\u2019re probably just going to try to piece a bullpen together with players they already have or can acquire cheaply. A big-time reliever, as risky an investment as there is in free agency or a trade, would give cover for them to do that with the other relief roles.<\/p>\n

\"Baltimore<\/p>\n

This will be the second Orioles offseason with owner David Rubenstein as the control person. (Ulysses Mu\u00f1oz\/The Banner)<\/p>\n

Elias is fortunate that pretty much every avenue to add in any of those categories is open to him. He\u2019s said for a while now that money isn\u2019t an issue, and I\u2019m interested to see what free agency looks like in his second offseason with ownership willing to spend. It turned out last year that they made a lot of short-term deals but were in the mix on longer-term ones for much bigger names, particularly on the mound. Could another year improve their ability to get one of those deals over the line? <\/p>\n

If it doesn\u2019t work for a pitcher, then it\u2019s a little easier to stomach spending on a hitter with good underlying metrics who you believe will age well enough and use the prospect capital they built over the last year for a starter, reliever or both. <\/p>\n

The Orioles\u2019 farm system isn\u2019t what it was when it was loaded with top-five picks and top-100 prospects, but even so, it\u2019s better suited for dealing players than it was then. It\u2019s really hard to get commensurate value when your only real trade chips double as your top prospects who you\u2019re counting on to help the team for a decade to come. It\u2019s much easier when those players aren\u2019t quite as promising and there are more of them in the hitting and pitching categories for other teams to choose from. <\/p>\n

It feels notable that a lot of this sentiment is just carryover from last winter, when the big deals and big signings didn\u2019t happen. Maybe what did happen was Plan B and they\u2019d wanted to swing bigger, but it doesn\u2019t feel like that was the house view of what this team needed.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s not only the house view that matters. Elias said he wants everyone to think the Orioles can win the division next year, and pretty much the only way to do that is by winning the offseason. That\u2019s not a carryover from any offseason under Elias. It\u2019s a complete departure from the norm and ups the stakes for a critical offseason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twice last Monday, Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias said the offseason goal is to enter spring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":["post-204949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}