Why Mike Elias should officially be on the hot seat in Baltimore

With yesterday's loss to the Athletics, the Baltimore Orioles took sole possession of last place in the AL East. It's a familiar place for both the fans who suffered through years of tanking and for the players who were on the team last year that went basically wire to wire in last place. Last year, when the Orioles fell flat on their face out of the gate, it was Brandon Hyde who took the fall. Now that the team continues to disappoint despite turning over the coaching staff, the attention is beginning to turn towards the President of Baseball Operations, Mike Elias.

Elias has made himself into an interesting character in Orioles history. The fans have a complicated and contradictory relationship with him. To some fans, he's a savior who stepped in and did what had to be done to bring winning baseball back to Baltimore. To others, he's the tank commander who subjected them to a half-decade of terrible baseball, promising a future of sustainable winning that never came. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Elias certainly deserves credit for what he's built in Baltimore. In 2018, he stepped into one of the worst situations in all of baseball. The Orioles had a terrible major league team and one of the worst farm systems in baseball. They were way behind the times in terms of analytics and international scouting. Not to mention the ownership situation with the Angelos.

Elias brought the Orioles into the modern era by establishing a real analytics department and overhauling the Orioles scouting practices. Over his first few years as GM, the major league team stayed terrible, but the farm system quickly rose up the rankings with every draft, international signing period, and trade deadline.

Not every draft pick and trade worked out during the tank, so fans can argue about the necessity of allowing the major league team to be that terrible for so many years, but nobody can deny that Elias played a pivotal role in creating a modern organizational infrastructure in Baltimore.

Under Mike Elias leadership the Orioles have been going in the wrong direction for multiple years now

However, the fact that Elias did so much to turn the Orioles around doesn't entitle him to be in charge of baseball operations in Baltimore indefinitely. He has been the GM/POBO for eight seasons now, and the Orioles have not won a single playoff game in that time. Eight years is a long time in baseball; no matter how bad of a starting point a GM gets, there's no reason for it to take eight years to turn things around.

At this point in Elias tenure, everything in the Orioles organization is the way it is because that's how he wants it to be. There's nothing left where you can use the excuse of, "That's the situation he walked into." Now that the new ownership has come in and given him more funds, there's not even the excuse that he's being held back by a penny-pinching boss. Everything about how the Orioles are run indicates that David Rubenstein has fully deferred to Elias every step of the way since coming in. There is no excuse for this team underperforming that doesn't ultimately lead back to Elias.

Beyond the simple case that Elias has been around for too long not to have won a single playoff game, there are other reasons to consider moving on from him.

In 2023, the Orioles were simultaneously the best team in the AL and had the best farm system in all of baseball. The fact that that season is now seen as this team's peak rather than the starting point for a long run of contending for the World Series can only be viewed as a massive failure and frankly, a firable offense.

Elias built a nice foundation, but has shown no ability to build on it. He refused to trade any of his top prospects, and now most of them have proven to be not nearly as good as they were projected to be. Despite Rubenstein giving him access to more funds to build the team, he's largely been inept at bringing in talent via free agency, and most of the players he's signed have been immediate duds.

He's just not good at making win-now moves that actually move the needle, and if an organization's goal is to contend for a World Series, your lead decision maker needs to be capable of pulling off win-now moves that don't instantly blow up in their face.

It's not like Elias is batting .000 since 2023. The Grayson Rodriguez trade looks like a nice piece of business, and he appears to have scored on a few of his trades at last year's deadline, but it's impossible to look at the direction of this franchise since 2023 and think that they are going in the right direction.

The Orioles can't afford to throw away any more seasons while Elias tries to figure it out. Unless this team makes a drastic turn around this season, this should be his last year as the President of Baseball Operations.

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