Mike Elias' Astros draft formula is at the center of the Orioles' farm system failure

One of the hallmarks of the Houston Astros' rebuild that Mike Elias brought over to Baltimore was the "draft hitting and trade for pitching" strategy for team building. The idea behind this strategy is that hitters, especially college hitters, are easier to scout, draft, and develop than pitchers. So by drafting hitters with the important early-round picks, the team gives itself the best shot at getting a good return on investment for its most expensive picks.

To a degree, this strategy has worked well. From 2019 to 2022, the Orioles drafted Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Westburg, Heston Kjerstad, Colton Cowser, Jackson Holliday, and Dylan Beavers in those important early rounds, and now those players are all contributing at the major league level.

During that same stretch, they also drafted Kyle Stowers, Connor Norby, Joey Ortiz, and Darrell Hernaiz, whom they were actually able to trade for pitching as they planned. That's an undeniably good stretch of drafting.

The Orioles have not been able to execute the "trade for pitching" part of their plan enough times to keep up with their need for pitching

However, part of why they were able to draft so many good position players was that they used almost all their top picks on position players. From 2019 to 2022, the Orioles did not draft and sign a single pitcher in the first four rounds of the draft. In 2023, they bucked the trend and drafted a pitcher in the second round, but then traded him less than a year later. 2024 saw the Orioles draft a pitcher in the fourth round, and then, in the most recent draft, the dam broke: they took two pitchers in the second round.

If a team is going to just, for the most part, opt out of using high draft picks on pitchers, they have to be willing/able to consistently trade position player prospects for pitching or be willing/able to sign impactful free agent pitchers. That is where the Orioles have fallen short.

They've made some good trades for pitching. Corbin Burnes, Zach Eflin, and Trevor Rogers all proved to be really good acquisitions, but if you're going to draft zero pitchers in the first four rounds of the draft for almost a half-decade, you have to be able to swing more than three trades. Three pitchers are not enough pitchers when no pitching prospects are coming down the pipeline.

Even with the Orioles' impressive group of homegrown position players, the lack of pitching holds the team back, and that lack of pitching can be traced directly to the front office largely ignoring that position in the draft over the past eight seasons. Action, meet consequence.

Here is what makes this drafting trend even more frustrating. The Orioles are actually pretty good at pitching development. They currently have two pitching prospects in the various top 100 prospect ranking lists, Trey Gibson and Luis De Leon, who are absolute development wins for the organization. Michael Forret, who the Orioles just barely traded away, is popping up on a bunch of lists as well, which is entirely due to the development he showed last year in the Orioles system.

Gibson was undrafted, Forret was a 14th-round pick, and Luis De Leon was signed for 30K. The Orioles took these mostly unknown pitchers and developed them into valuable prospects. Imagine what the pitching lab could have produced over the last few years if, instead of working with long-shot prospects taken in the last few rounds of the draft, they were regularly working with talented arms taken in the first round.

The past is the past, and there is nothing the Orioles can do to change that, but they can try to change the future. Now that signing/trading for pitching has proved much more difficult than they imagined, the Orioles need to change their draft strategy so that they can build their rotation through the draft.