Mike Elias’ focus Thursday was reflecting on 2023. But plenty of questions face the Orioles in the months before the 2024 season begins.
In an end-of-season news conference Thursday morning, the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager said the team’s inability to advance past the American League Division Series after a 101-win regular season falls on him, not the players, and made no promises the club would carry a higher payroll next season.
Before fielding and answering questions for almost half an hour inside Camden Yards’ auxiliary clubhouse, Elias first thanked the members of the Orioles’ roster, a group of players who brought Baltimore its first AL East title since 2014 despite several forecasts the team would finish last in the division.
“I’ll never forget getting the chance to work with these guys, and luckily, we’re gonna be working with many, many, many of them going forward,” Elias said. “We asked a lot of them, and they delivered, so any shortcomings that anyone perceives with the 2023 campaign should be directed towards me.”
Both during and after an 83-win 2022 season, Elias suggested the Orioles would increase their payroll, one that entered that breakout campaign as the lowest in the majors. Over the winter, it went up by about 50%, largely accounted for by Baltimore signing Kyle Gibson, Adam Frazier and Mychal Givens to one-year contracts totaling $23 million; each respective deal represented the largest the Orioles had given to a starting pitcher, position player and reliever in Elias’ five offseasons at the helm.
Still, the Orioles’ season-opening payroll of $60.9 million, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, was the second lowest in the majors, ahead of only an Oakland Athletics team that won half as many games as they did. Givens was released during the season, and Gibson and Frazier join midseason acquisitions Aaron Hicks, Jack Flaherty and Shintaro Fujinami as Baltimore’s pending free agents. Including projections for the Orioles’ 16 arbitration-eligible players — all of whom aren’t guaranteed to return — Cot’s projects a payroll of about $67.2 million.
About 36 hours after the Orioles’ season ended, Elias said it was too early to discuss specific targets for the offseason or whether fans can expect the team to have a larger payroll in 2024 than it did in 2023.
“I’m just in Day 1 of our offseason,” Elias said when asked the latter.
He did say both he and manager Brandon Hyde will be back next season — “We are 100% in on this … and I hope that lasts forever.” — and that the baseball operations department has already started planning, which he described as “one of the unwanted consolation prizes of getting eliminated early.” The Texas Rangers, who opened the season with the AL’s second-largest payroll, swept the Orioles in the best-of-five ALDS, the first time Baltimore did not win at least once in any multi-game series since May 2022.
That streak began shortly before the Orioles promoted catcher Adley Rutschman, the first of what will be three straight Elias draftees to top Baseball America’s offseason list of the game’s top prospects, with infielders Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday following him with that status.
Rutschman and Henderson were Baltimore’s two most valuable players this season by FanGraphs’ version of wins above replacement. As other teams have locked up their young stars, the Orioles’ pair remains without long-term extensions. Under Elias, the only players to receive guaranteed multi-year contracts from Baltimore were John Means and Félix Bautista, pitchers who each agreed to two-year deals that did not delay their free agency after they suffered elbow injuries that necessitated Tommy John surgery.
In August, Orioles CEO and Chairman John Angelos told the New York Times the organization would be “financially underwater” if it handed out nine-figure contracts to even a handful of the young stars Baltimore’s four-year rebuild produced. Asked Thursday about Angelos’ comments, Elias said statements to media sometimes “don’t come out exactly how you meant them, especially little snippets of what you said,” adding that although the front office does not publicize its efforts to sign players to extensions, it explores the possibility of them “in the background.”
“We are very focused on keeping this organization as successful and healthy as possible within the constraints of reality,” Elias said. “Obviously, we have players here that we love, and you look at it right now and you go, ‘Boy, I wish we had those guys under contract for longer than they currently are,’ and a big part of the calculus of keeping this franchise healthy is pursuing or examining opportunities to possibly keep some of these guys longer.”
Despite the lack of extensions, the overwhelming majority of the 2023 Orioles have multiple seasons of team control remaining, which excites Elias given how the team overperformed expectations, including his own.
“I wish we made a better playoff run,” Elias said. “The regular season, I mean, 101 wins in the American League East, we were dreaming of that when we started the rebuild. It seemed impossible, and the people here pulled it together, and I think it’s just a historic achievement. This group of players, regardless of where else they go in their careers and their lives, I hope that the city of Baltimore remembers this group for kind of reminding the world that this is Baltimore and we do baseball here, and that’s my goal going forward as long as I’m responsible for keeping that being the case.”
How he does so while balancing the organization’s present and future is “all I think about every day of my life,” Elias said. Even with this year’s success and the young players promoted to be a part of it, the Orioles still hold what’s considered to be baseball’s most talent-stocked minor league system. If Elias is facing financial constraints in his efforts to improve the major league roster, he could instead pull from that talent and execute a trade.
The deals he has struck thus far in which he acquired a major leaguer for prospects have not necessarily dazzled. Offseason additions James McCann and Cole Irvin were serviceable in their respective roles of backup catcher and pitching staff swingman. Flaherty and Fujinami, added ahead of the August deadline to boost the pitching staff, both struggled to be consistent; brought in to fortify Baltimore’s rotation, Flaherty spent the final three weeks of the season as an infrequently used reliever, and Fujinami was left off the Orioles’ ALDS roster.
“I lament that our outcomes at the trade deadline, obviously, didn’t propel us through the ALDS,” Elias said. “On the other hand, I was very focused on winning the division, and we did that.”
Acknowledging “we obviously didn’t hit on 100% of the things that we did,” Elias did not suggest Flaherty and Fujinami’s performances will alter how the Orioles approach future deadlines and, in that way, likely this offseason.
“We’re constantly curtailing them and trying to make them better, but we use methodologies and philosophies that got us from the depths of despair to where we are right now as an organization, and we use them because they work,” Elias said. “You don’t want to betray them too often because I think we’ve proven that we’ve got good information and good guiding principles and good people.”
Elias said the Orioles had other pursuits at the trade deadline that didn’t come to fruition. He earlier acknowledged similar experiences last winter, saying the club had multi-year offers out to players in the range of $40 million to $60 million across the life of the contracts only for those players to sign elsewhere.
“Those pursuits will be on the menu again,” Elias said. “We’re trying to win.”
But it will require more investment than that for the Orioles to sign Rutschman, Henderson or the top-of-the-rotation starter they lacked in the postseason. Against the Rangers, Baltimore started three pitchers within their first three major league seasons and received eight total innings from them with 13 runs allowed. Hyde, who followed Elias’ session with his own, said Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez — who started Games 1 and 2 after ranking first and third in the AL in second-half ERA — could develop into aces but are “a ways away.”
“A true No. 1 is a guy that is going to stop any sort of losing streak, a guy that’s going to go dominate a team in [the] postseason, those type of guys, and those are hard to find,” Hyde said. “But those two guys have the stuff and the ability to be that type of guy.”
Hyde twice said he was “still pissed” with how the Orioles’ season ended, and although he will continue to follow the postseason, he will “watch a little irritated.” He won’t be heavily involved in Elias’ offseason decisions, saying he’s pleased with the veterans Elias has brought into the clubhouse in recent years.
But Hyde will once again play the role of recruiter, trying to pitch free agents on his team. The past season, despite its ending, will help his case.
“I look back at all those players we talked to, the ones that didn’t come here, we were pretty right on,” Hyde said. “We were honest. We thought we were going to be good. We thought they could be a help. We thought our team was going to be exciting and have a chance to win the AL East, and we were right.
“Everybody from last year was very interested because of the talent we have on our team and what we’re going to look like going forward. I think it’s going to be the same way this year, where people are going to see that they enjoy playing here, this is a fun team to be on and we’re going to win.”
Elias’ hope is that all of Hyde’s points prove true.
“I want to reflect on 2023, promise everybody and the fans that we’re keeping our foot on the gas pedal for keeping Baltimore baseball great and having an even better season next year, especially in the postseason, to whatever degree we can control that,” he said. “We’re going to do our jobs this winter.”
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