Elias and Hyde address the media today

[LGOrioles]

11 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

I don't disagree with any of this.  I'm really looking at bullpen upgrades over the course of this offseason.  I want a lockdown pen next year.  Felix coming back plays a big part of that, of course but I'd like 3-4 legit options in front of him.

I think if they add one legit 7th/8th inning option, they will pretty much be set. Bautista, Coulombe, Cano, Dominguez, Webb, Soto/Perez, Akin is a solid 7 to start with. Almost all of those guys at one point this season were one of their 2 or 3 most trusted relievers. Adding a backend guy and having Coulombe/Dominguez/Cano available pretty much every 7th inning with a lead sure would be nice. 

[Bemorewins]

Just now, Fiver6565 said:

He's perfectly capable of building a team that can succeed in October.  In fact, the last two teams he built were capable of succeeding in October - they just didn't.  Look at the lineups yesterday.  Back in April, which one would you take or bet money on for a do or die game in October?  That's what Elias built, and what he will continue to build.  At some point the talent has to and will get it done.  The playoffs are a crapshoot - we all know this.  5 games will not define Elias' tenure as GM.  They just won't.

We disagree which is fine. IMO we had a very shaky bullpen who over-performed in SSS against a very mediocre to paltry offense in KC who was scoring less than 3 runs a game for like the last 2 weeks of the season.

I by no means felt this bullpen was capable of succeeding for another 3 rounds against much better hitting teams.

But I will agree that at the deadline Elias couldn’t have predicted the offense’s collapse. Except he did nothing to sure up our real season long weakness against LHP. Eloy Jimenez was a joke of an acquisition. When the worst team in MLB is glad to see you go that tells me all I need to know about you.

[deward]

4 minutes ago, Fiver6565 said:

He's perfectly capable of building a team that can succeed in October.  In fact, the last two teams he built were capable of succeeding in October - they just didn't.  Look at the lineups yesterday.  Back in April, which one would you take or bet money on for a do or die game in October?  That's what Elias built, and what he will continue to build.  At some point the talent has to and will get it done.  The playoffs are a crapshoot - we all know this.  5 games will not define Elias' tenure as GM.  They just won't.

One of his teams eventually has to break through, or else the failure to do so absolutely will define his tenure, fairly or not.

[Fiver6565]

1 minute ago, deward said:

One of his teams eventually has to break through, or else the failure to do so absolutely will define his tenure, fairly or not.

yes, and by then, one way or another, it will be more than 5 games.

[deward]

7 minutes ago, Fiver6565 said:

yes, and by then, one way or another, it will be more than 5 games.

Not necessarily. They could miss the playoffs entirely over the next couple of years and he could get fired.

[Fiver6565]

1 minute ago, deward said:

Not necessarily. They could miss the playoffs entirely over the next couple of years and he could get fired.

In which case, again, those 5 games won't be the deciding factor in him getting fired!!!!

The overreactions to Elias and acting like he's on some sort of hot seat is just over the top by anyone calling for his head or whatever they're doing.  I know its an emotional loss and whatnot, but FFS have some perspective.  This is a franchise that has been moribund for the better part of 40 damn years.  We just made the playoffs two years in a row for the first time in 27 years.  The idea that the manager or GM should be fired on the heels of that, because of two bad series in the playoffs, is laughable at best.  You want to go right back into the dumpster with this team?  Dump the GM and manager now.  See who would be willing to come work for you.  Its just a non-starter as even a conversation.  Its dumb.

[deward]

3 minutes ago, Fiver6565 said:

In which case, again, those 5 games won't be the deciding factor in him getting fired!!!!

The overreactions to Elias and acting like he's on some sort of hot seat is just over the top by anyone calling for his head or whatever they're doing.  I know its an emotional loss and whatnot, but FFS have some perspective.  This is a franchise that has been moribund for the better part of 40 damn years.  We just made the playoffs two years in a row for the first time in 27 years.  The idea that the manager or GM should be fired on the heels of that, because of two bad series in the playoffs, is laughable at best.  You want to go right back into the dumpster with this team?  Dump the GM and manager now.  See who would be willing to come work for you.  Its just a non-starter as even a conversation.  Its dumb.

I didn't say they would be. In that (admittedly, worst case) scenario though, those five games do become a big part of the legacy of his tenure here. That's just how it works, again, fairly or not. I'm not calling for anyone to be fired, I'm just saying that the entire point of all this is to win in the post-season, and if he can't achieve that, then that failure is going to dim his other accomplishments. 

[Fiver6565]

3 minutes ago, deward said:

I didn't say they would be. In that (admittedly, worst case) scenario though, those five games do become a big part of the legacy of his tenure here. That's just how it works, again, fairly or not. I'm not calling for anyone to be fired, I'm just saying that the entire point of all this is to win in the post-season, and if he can't achieve that, then that failure is going to dim his other accomplishments. 

sure, long term I agree.  Its not exactly a hot take to say if he never wins a playoff game as GM, that won't help his legacy.  I don't expect that to be the case.

[Emory Eagle]

1 hour ago, foxfield said:

I dont mean to use your post...but something uncharacteristically negative happened has me thinking about a question I want to ask but feel it will cause a political storm.  So I am not raising this question to start a debate on an issue, but I am genuinely curious.

What happened to the Orioles sometime in June seemed to be that they no longer were a cohesive unit.  Yes there were injuries.  But injuries can also bring tight groups together.  This group that has seemed tight almost seemed to splinter.  Sure winning is fun and when it stops nothing is as fun.  But it seems like something could have happened that internally split this group apart.  Did it?  Whatever IT would be happened sometime in June before the All Star Break.  Until then things were rolling and Gunnar was raising the question of whether he was having the best season by a SS ever.  

So what started the slide?

Did it start after the Yankee Series in NY after a 17-5 win on June 20 with the Orioles leaving town after taking 2 of 3?  The Orioles went to Houston and lost three straight before returning to Baltimore and losing 2 straight to Cleveland before righting the ship and taking game three.

Then Orioles played well at times after but never again played like a team in command.  So I went back and saw that the Texas series began on 6/27 with an 11-2 game started by Burnes (7 innings 88 Pitches) and included HRs by Mullins, Kjerstad, Rutschman and Cowser and in looking at all of that I saw something that I honestly had completely forgotten about.

On June 27, the Orioles hosted the Rangers and began an MLB sponsored Pride Week.  Not really a bid deal, most all MLB teams and professional teams do.  Like it.  Hate it.  They all do it.  But I also saw the post that Austin Hays put out that same day on instagram.  He didn't say anything specific about the Pride events, he shared a religious point of view that spoke about evil.  The links were not direct, but obvious.  

Cut to today.  The Orioles have never regained the superiority they held over everyone prior to June.  Hays...is gone.  I know he was an obvious trade candidate.  I thought the idea of trading him was fine.  But my question is did the events around Pride Night June 27 somehow cause a fracture in a clubhouse?  

And please I am not saying it did.  I am simply a fan who is stuggling to see what broke.  I mean I see what broke.  But why?  The Red Sox collapse in 2011 had pizza and beer and locker room drama that came out after the fact to explain their epic collapse.  The didn't become excellent chokers magically on Sept 3 with a 9 game lead and then totally miss the playoffs when the Great Andino drove in the final nail. Something broke, it spread and it ate everything.

I just think it is more likely something interpersonal happened in the clubhouse than the franchise approach that was working stopped.  Or that all of MLB found a way to turn Henderson from a player on a 12 WAR pace to one who struggled to field, throw, hit and run.  

So my question to the GM and Manager would be.  Did something happen in mid June that affected the psyche of this team and was it related to the June 27 post by Austin Hays on the first night of Pride Week?  Thank you and I'll take your answer off line.

Zero chance anything like that has anything to do with the product on the field IMO.  Especially in baseball, which is inherently more a collection of individual performances than a true team sport.  I don’t think clubhouse culture matters at all in baseball except insofar as if gone wrong it might lead to disregard for fundamentals or disruptive off field behavior like excessive drinking or drug use.

[oriolediehard]

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2024/10/orioles-rumors-payroll-increase-2025.html

Orioles General Manager Expects To Have Greater Payroll Capacity

The Orioles were eliminated from the postseason by the Royals yesterday, sending them into offseason mode. General manager Mike Elias spoke to the members of the media today to address various topics related to the club. Most notably, he said that manager Brandon Hyde would return in 2025, though he was noncommittal about the rest of the coaching staff. Additionally, he said that he is “pretty confident” that payroll will be going up next year. Details were relayed by Andy Kostka of the Baltimore Banner (X link) and Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com (X link).

It was another good season for Baltimore in a sense, as they won 91 games and made the playoffs for a second consecutive year. On the other hand, it was also disappointing for many fans. The O’s won 101 games in 2023 and had a seemingly endless supply of young talent, which set expectations fairly high coming into 2024. The club was strong for much of the 2024 season but limped to the finish line with 10 fewer wins than the year before, settling for a wild card berth. For a second straight year, they were quickly swept out of the postseason.

The disappointment will naturally lead to some finger pointing, though it seems Elias isn’t placing blame at Hyde’s feet. It’s always tough to discern whether a manager deserves credit and/or blame for a team’s performance and there were certainly things that were beyond the skipper’s control this year.

Rotation injuries were a key storyline for the O’s this year, as each of Kyle Bradish, John Means and Tyler Wells each required UCL surgery in June. The club tried to address the rotation at the deadline by acquiring Zach Eflin and Trevor Rogers. The Eflin pickup worked out well, but Rogers struggled after the jersey swap and waas optioned down to the minors. The rotation issues were further compounded when Grayson Rodriguez hit the shelf with a lat injury in August, which eventually ended his season. Some players also just struggled as the season wore on, with Craig Kimbrel and Adley Rutschman being two prominent examples.

While Hyde’s contributions to the 2024 results can be debated, it seems Elias and the franchise have decided that a new skipper won’t be necessary. The club hasn’t been forthcoming about Hyde’s contractual status. It was reported in April of 2022 that Hyde was under contract beyond that season as part of an extension that was quietly worked out in 2020, but with few details available apart from that. He eventually won American League Manager of the Year honors for the 2023 season and stuck around for 2024. It’s unclear if that 2020 extension is still going or if the two sides have done another deal away from prying eyes, but it seems Hyde will be back in the dugout next year regardless.

Elias and his front office team will be tasked with building a roster that gives Hyde a chance to have a better finish in 2025. There will be some notable subtractions, as the O’s are set to lose ace Corbin Burnes and slugger Anthony Santander to free agency. The departure of Burnes will deprive them of a star who posted a 2.92 ERA over 32 starts, plus eight innings of one-run ball in the playoffs, while Santander’s exit takes a 44-homer bat out of the lineup.

The fact that Elias expects to have more financial resources to supplement the roster is good news, though it’s also not surprising. The Angelos family wasn’t investing much in the club during the final years of their reign. Per Cot’s Baseball Contracts, 2024 was the sixth straight year in which the club ran a bottom five payroll.

New owner David Rubenstein’s purchase of the club was officially approved by the league at the end of March and it’s generally been expected that he would ramp up spending from those recent low points. The aforementioned Eflin trade was perhaps a positive omen in that regard, as the righty is owed $18MM next year. As shown in MLBTR’s Contract Tracker, Kimbrel’s $13MM one-year pact is the largest deal given out since Elias took over as GM in November of 2018. Adding $18MM to next year’s budget, plus the roughly one third of Eflin’s $11MM salary in 2024 that was still to be paid out, could have been a signal that Rubenstein had signed off on giving Elias more spending power.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Elias is going to go out and spend like the proverbial drunken sailor. “We’ll see what happens,” the GM said in regards to the payroll question, per Jake Rill of MLB.com on X. “We’re going to be smart about it. And if it doesn’t happen for some reason, it’s not going to be because the financial support wasn’t there. It’s going to be because the people running this team thought it was the right thing to do from a number of levels on a case-by-case basis. But I want to reiterate that I don’t expect that to be the case.”

Ultimately, it may be something of a fresh start for Elias and his team. They have seemingly had very little financial resources to work with, which was fine for much of his tenure. He and the club were primarily focused on building a pipeline of young prospects and have succeeded. Just about every outlet has ranked them as having one of the top farm systems in recent years, if not the very top, which has allowed them to fill out their roster with young talent like Rutschman, Bradish, Rodriguez, Gunnar Henderson, Colton Cowser, Jackson Holliday and many more.

Some have argued that Elias should have had more willingness to trade that young talent as the club became competitive in recent years, particularly for more pitching depth that could have helped them overcome their injury woes this season, though perhaps the uncertainty around the club’s future payrolls led to some hesitation to give up cheap and controllable players.

How the new environment will change the club’s behavior will be an interesting offseason storyline. The free agent market will feature a number of big names, with Burnes the top pitcher while star position players like Juan Soto, Alex Bregman, Pete Alonso and others will be available. Suddenly splurging on one of the top names would be a surprise but it should be possible for the O’s if the will is there. Per Cot’s, the club had a payroll as high as $164MM before their recent rebuilding period. They were only at $93MM in 2024 while RosterResource has them committed to just $37MM next year. Arbitration raises and some club options will bring that number up but there should be lots of powder dry if the club decides to be aggressive.

The club still has a fairly strong position player group, even with Santander set to depart, so pitching would be the obvious place to spend. Félix Bautista is expected to return after missing 2024 recovering from Tommy John surgery. That will bolster the bullpen, but further reinforcements wouldn’t hurt. The rotation without Burnes could feature Eflin, Rodriguez and Dean Kremer. Young pitchers like Cade Povich and Chayce McDermott could work their way into the mix, while Rogers could get back on track after his disappointing season. Bradish and Wells could get back into the mix by midseason, but Means is slated for free agency.

It seems like Albert Suárez will be an option as well. Though he has far less than six years of service time, players who return from pitching in Japan or Korea often get provisions in their new contracts that allow them to become free agents regardless of service time considerations. That doesn’t appear to be the case with Suárez, even though he pitched in the KBO in 2022 and 2023. Per Matt Weyrich of the Baltimore Sun (X link), Elias said this summer that the O’s would be able to keep him beyond 2024.

There are a number of options there but there’s still an argument for trying to bring back Burnes or another talented starter. Blake Snell is likely to opt out and join Burnes as a former Cy Young winner on the market. Max Fried, Jack Flaherty, Yusei Kikuchi, Luis Severino and plenty of other notable names will be out there as well. As recently as a year ago, the idea of connecting the Orioles to free agents of that caliber would have been a stretch, but it will seemingly be more plausible going forward.

[eddie83]

https://video.masnsports.com/orioles
 

 

Elias and Hyde press videos on here. 

Edited 1 hour ago by eddie83

[deward]

19 minutes ago, Fiver6565 said:

sure, long term I agree.  Its not exactly a hot take to say if he never wins a playoff game as GM, that won't help his legacy.  I don't expect that to be the case.

I hope it won't be the case, but the org is in a worse position coming into this off-season than it was a year ago. It doesn't have to be a bad position, with the right moves, but it's a worse one, relatively speaking. He had the org in such a good position, looking back at 2022, but he missed the "easy" part of the competitive window with this group (with a bunch of pre-arb talent and minimal committed payroll). It's only going to get more difficult from here. He's burned through some prospect capital, the last couple of drafts don't appear to have been really knocked out of the park, the relative down period from the rest of the division is closing, and the clock is inexorably ticking on Gunnar and Adley. I think the next year or two will be put up or shut up time for Elias (and for Rubenstein, for that matter). 

[Baseball fandom]

So Ellis is tyying himself to Hyde for another yea. Good they both can go next year if it's another failure and yes this was a failure to me sorry if you Hyde and Elias apologist don't believe so but to me it was. Elias draft picks are looking to be overrated and his trades aren't all that good either with the exception of Burnes and Eflin and Burnes is gonezo. Elias may be too  conservative to put this team over the top. Hyde should be gone.   

[EERinthe804]

8 minutes ago, Baseball fandom said:

So Ellis is tyying himself to Hyde for another yea. Good they both can go next year if it's another failure and yes this was a failure to me sorry if you Hyde and Elias apologist don't believe so but to me it was. Elias draft picks are looking to be overrated and his trades aren't all that good either with the exception of Burnes and Eflin and Burnes is gonezo. Elias may be too  conservative to put this team over the top. Hyde should be gone.   

Ignorance is everywhere.

[Fiver6565]

6 minutes ago, deward said:

I hope it won't be the case, but the org is in a worse position coming into this off-season than it was a year ago. It doesn't have to be a bad position, with the right moves, but it's a worse one, relatively speaking. He had the org in such a good position, looking back at 2022, but he missed the "easy" part of the competitive window with this group (with a bunch of pre-arb talent and minimal committed payroll). It's only going to get more difficult from here. He's burned through some prospect capital, the last couple of drafts don't appear to have been really knocked out of the park, the relative down period from the rest of the division is closing, and the clock is inexorably ticking on Gunnar and Adley. I think the next year or two will be put up or shut up time for Elias (and for Rubenstein, for that matter). 

I keep seeing people saying this, but how exactly is the organization worse off, beyond any normal attrition of the prospect group?  Still plenty of up and coming young players, still flexibility in payroll.  Pitching staff still several starter candidates - and the closer returning.  If anything, Santander going to FA frees up a young player or two to get more PT (ie Kjerstad playing most days in RF).  You say the clock is ticking on Gunnar and Adley, and that's true. But you an just as easily say that they each (especially Gunnar) have another year under their very young belts, and are likely to come back next year and use that experience for further improvement (same for Cowser, Westburg, Grayson, Holliday, and others).  But we'd rather dwell on the negative take on that topic.

Actually I'm just not interested in continuing this discussion.  I'm sure the fates of Elias and Hyde will be a long term discussion point on this board, and there will be no convincing people of its inanity.  Plenty of people are adamant that Hyde should be fired - ridiculous and I'm tired of hearing about it already.  Plenty of people feel like Elias is in put up or shut up mode, or on the hot seat, or whatever.  Also ridiculous, and also tired of hearing about it already.

The lack of perspective and appreciation from people for what HAS been accomplished, due to what hasn't, is just annoying. 29 teams go home unhappy every year.  18 teams went home before we did.  I'm glad of that at least.  So, with all due respect to you and anyone else I've engaged with on the topic, I'm just going to bow out.

Thanks.