Mike Elias is going to tell Orioles fans next week about how different 2027 is going to be.
Now that he’s got his new general manager, who isn’t really a general manager but a useful tool to distract from Elias’s nine-year failure, get ready for another sordid sales pitch from a baseball exec who thinks it’s better to spin and gaslight fans to save money for private equity billionaires than it is to actually win games. They need your money and they need to hock those Birdland Memberships even after they terminate Mr. Splash and The Oriole Bird to save a few bucks.
It really is that bad and Elias really is that shallow.
He will spend next week, when they formally announce Jared Bowman as the GM with a Tuesday press conference, trying to convince you that he’s learned his lessons. Elias will pretend that throwing out over-promoted Matt Blood and hiring a new alleged player-development maven to replace him (but keeping flunkies Sig Mejdal and his assistant GMs who have supported the endless rebuild all along) is some monumental shift in their pathetic player evaluation, roster construction and contract negotiating that’s left them a collective 39 games off the pace in the AL East the last two years.
It is not.
But as we pointed out earlier this week, there are some things in Banner’s background that could perhaps nudge a few things forward in Baltimore on the margins. There are also major, major concerns about the Orioles flawed front-office paradigm that will likely undermine all of that by a longshot. But since they are adding someone with a nice resume, perhaps Elias will let him impact more than just taking meeting with the media off his plate. Perhaps he can also get Elias to change a few things about how he operates.
We aren’t looking for much here, and we aren’t expecting anything, but from a strategic standpoint maybe Elias could change his ways at least in this regard.
Be Proactive
He wants to bargain shop, yet he constantly negotiates some of the dumbest contracts in the league. For a guy who doesn’t want to spend David Rubenstein’s money, he sure does waste a ton overpaying for Craig Kimbrel and Charlie Morton and Tomo Sugano and Tyler O’Neill and Chris Bassitt and Ryan Helsley and I could go on.
Elias loves to wait to see if a bargain falls through the cracks and scoop things up late. He’s almost never proactive at the trade deadline, either. He lacks urgency and passion and drive – he’s a baseball cyborg who lacks a pulse – but maybe Banner could push him in another direction. If you know the market and attack the right targets at the right time you don’t have to sit back and let others do the work for you to see what’s left over.
He needs to make a major move or two happen at the Winter Meetings and ideally that would be shipping out Gunnar Henderson and, well, Jackson Holliday as well, so that he knows what else he needs to address for the duration of the offseason. Auction off Gunnar and move on.
Defense Matters
I’ll believe this when I see it.
But maybe watching how far the Guardians advances and seeing the two small market teams in the World Series who play baseball The Oriole Way and not The Elias Way will have an impact on this stubborn narcissist. Perhaps, when Elias yammered on about tweaking his supercomputer back at the end-of-season press conference, he will actually value advanced fielding metrics.
Might he actually take some time to ponder the melding of players with glove attributes that compliment one another (instead of vast, defensively-deficient redundancies)?
We can all hope and dream.
Let Someone Else Negotiate
Banner doesn’t have a deep background negotiating contracts and that’s not been his forte. Everyone we have had on “The Daily Flock Show” who covers baseball extensively has pointed out Elias has his fingers on everything and this is all his baby and certainly when it comes to high-end trade talks and free-agent contracts he is a one-man gang.
Maybe try sitting some of that out. Let someone who doesn't keep offering silly opt-ins to players with high injury risk take a spin at handling the details.
Elias and Sig are not well liked for a multitude of reasons, they lack basic people skills and communication savvy and, look, nothing will ever happen in this organization that Elias doesn’t ultimately sign off on as long as he’s here, but more progress might be made if others are offering the proposals and doing the vocalizing and handling the back-and-forth with agents and other executive around the league.
You want anyone to take Banner remotely seriously as a traditional GM, at least let him try the wheel on some of that stuff.
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