With Trevor Rogers, Orioles apparently continuing sad pattern of avoiding extensions

Over the course of Mike Elias' tenure as the lead decision maker for the Baltimore Orioles, there have been consistent trends in how the Orioles front office has operated. They have not prioritized pitching, and they have mostly avoided multi-year contracts and extensions. Those two trends appear to have come together this offseason as Trevor Rogers, arguably their best pitcher, who is about to enter his final year under team control, informed the media that the Orioles had not approached him about a possible extension.

Not even trying to extend Rogers is a head-scratching decision. Acquiring starting pitching has proven to be very difficult for the Orioles. Whether it's not agreeing with other organizations about the prospect capital in a trade or not agreeing with a free agent over dollars and years, the Orioles have fallen short year after year.

Orioles attitude towards extensions makes it hard for them to build their rotation

Many excuses have been made. "The White Sox were asking for too much for Dylan Cease!" "Corbin Burnes only wanted to play in Arizona!" Whether they are good excuses or not, the fact remains you cannot force another front office to make a trade they don't want to make, and you can't force a free agent to sign somewhere he doesn't want to play.

With Rogers, the Orioles already have him in the building. At the end of last season, he gave multiple quotes indicating that he was happy in Baltimore and would be open to an extension, and in his opening media interaction, Rogers reiterated that he'd be open to sticking around. Now, spring training of his final year under team control is here, and he has not been extended.

The issue isn't that the Orioles failed to extend Rogers; it's that they apparently failed to even try. It would be one thing if the Orioles had reached out and just hadn't been able to come to an agreement with Rogers. That would still be disappointing, but if the Orioles had made a competitive offer and Rogers had turned them down, then there's not too much more fans could ask of them.

The fact that they didn't even try to extend Rogers points to an unearned organizational arrogance when it comes to pitching. The message that they're sending by not even trying is that offering a contract extension to a really good pitcher is not something that they are philosophically interested in, and that they believe that they'll be able to replace his production more cost-effectively next offseason.

Based on their attempts to bring in top pitching talent the past few offseasons, there is little reason to believe they'll be able to acquire a better pitcher than Rogers. Assuming Rogers pitches well at all in 2026, there shouldn't be much confidence that the Orioles will be able to re-sign him.

No matter how "grateful" Rogers is to the Orioles for helping him get his career on track, he is going to go to the highest bidder, and the Orioles will be left trying to fill his spot in the rotation with next year's version of Chris Bassitt.

A year from now, when people are once again talking about the Orioles rotation being a problem, one of the root causes will be their philosophy about extensions that leads them to not even try to extend Trevor Rogers this offseason. It's a bad philosophy, it's holding the team back, and the front office either needs to change how they think about extensions or they're never going to be able to build the "sustainable winner" that they've always talked about.