Orioles hire Jared Banner, Cubs assistant, as GM

The Orioles really meant it this time about hiring a general manager. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Monday morning that the team has chosen Jared Banner, who was most recently serving as an assistant GM with the Cubs since 2023, to join the O’s front office as GM. Passan added that over the course of his career, Banner has also worked with the Mets and White Sox.

In terms of the ultimate decisionmaking in the Orioles front office, hiring Banner as the GM is not going to change the fact that Mike Elias is still what is colloquially understood as “the GM,” that is, the guy who is in charge of baseball operations. That authority rests in a person with the president of baseball operations title.

However, in hiring Banner, the O’s have brought in someone from outside the organization who is supposed to have a lot of influence in player development, an area where Elias has obliquely acknowledged that he’s been lacking in recent seasons. Banner has been working in a variety of player development roles since 2007, when he took a job with the Red Sox. Among his past titles is executive director of player development, which he held with the Mets in 2018 and 2019.

Unless you are related to Jared Banner, you have probably never thought about him or been aware of his existence before today. I certainly haven’t. Whether he will actually be able to do what needs to be done to help improve the Orioles fortunes is not something we can know. He does have at least one nice feather in his cap, according to MLB Network’s Jon Heyman:

That’s referring to Pete Crow-Armstrong, the probable National League MVP this season, who the Cubs acquired from the Mets back in 2021. Solid talent evaluation there, though Orioles fans, after two lean years, will be hoping for a smashing success on a much shorter time frame than that at this point.

Going into this, if I had believed the Orioles were actually going to hire a GM this time instead of poke around like they might and never do it, my ideal candidate would have probably come from either the Rays or Brewers, teams that either get by with about as many resources as the Orioles or even fewer.

The way this postseason has gone, those teams are still in it, meaning the guys are still doing their jobs and probably not getting the opportunity to interview for promotions. Should Elias have waited to see if he could talk to someone in those front offices? Again, I just have no way to evaluate.

What I can say is that the Cubs have not been a perennial powerhouse team of late. They have made the postseason as a wild card in each of the past two seasons, but before that, their last 162-game season where they made it into the playoffs was 2018.

If Banner can do what the Orioles need him to do, then it doesn’t really matter how his last organization performed lately. The franchise needs to actually develop talent that can play at the highest level consistently, rather than continue to unearth guys who can build up prospect hype and even rookie season hype but not manage to sustain that over the next few years.