Snyder’s Soapbox: Mike Elias wanted to turn the Orioles into the Astros, but he can’t get out of the rebuild

Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.

Maybe it’s because it’s so early in the season. Maybe it’s because the market is small. Maybe it’s because the team hasn’t been more relevant than others in its division in a long time. 

Whatever the reason, I’m finding one of the things that bothers me most here in the early going is the relative lack of attention on what is going on with the Baltimore Orioles. 

Entering Tuesday, the Orioles are 13-20. The only teams in baseball that are definitely worse than the Orioles are the White Sox and Rockies. Some might want to argue the Pirates or Marlins or Angels are worse, but we could all agree that it’s a toss up and they are all on the same tier. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not in 2025. 

Remember, when Mike Elias took over as general manager, he decided to try and emulate what happened with the Houston Astros, where he cut his teeth as a higher-up executive under Jeff Luhnow. The Astros have been one of the best organizations in baseball, in terms of consistent winning, for the past decade. It worked. 

Did it work with the Orioles? We’re still in the process of finding out, but we cannot ignore the extreme rebuild. Again, it was the same formula the Astros used, basically: Bottom out and lose your ass off for years. Hope the fans will come back when you start winning again. 

The Orioles in 2018 lost a franchise-record 115 games. In 2019, they lost 108 games. In 2021, they lost 110. 

Those are the three highest loss totals in the history of the Baltimore Orioles. The St. Louis Browns lost 111 once, and that is technically the same franchise, but the Orioles had never lost more than 107 before Elias’ radical rebuild, during which they lost more than 107 in three straight full seasons. 

This is a proud franchise with a great fan base. They were once a powerhouse. From 1964-83, the Orioles won at least 90 games 16 times in 19 full seasons. They had a losing record just once in that span. They won at least 100 games five times, making eight ALCS and six World Series, winning the World Series three times. 

Things could a downward turn after that, yes. Remember that famous Sports Illustrated cover with Billy Ripken’s forehead against a bat while he looked all despondent? It said “0-18” and “The Agony of the Orioles.” 

Yeah, that team actually started 0-21 and still ended up with a better record than the 2018, 2019 and 2021 Orioles. 

To put that fan base through that type of a rebuild, the end result better be fantastic. 

The Orioles did post pretty great farm rankings. They churned out some major position players. Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson are stars and there’s a chance others will join that conversation soon. 

This group, however, is 0-5 in the playoffs. The state of the pitching staff right now — a 5.43 collective ERA with not much hope for a drastic turnaround — suggests that record will be the same heading into the offseason. 

Actively punting seasons to the extent the Orioles did doesn’t sit right with me. You’re still supposed to be an entertaining product for your audience and to essentially tell fans, “yeah, we’re trying to lose on purpose for almost five years” just feels like it’s in bad faith to me. There are other ways to build a winner. Don’t cry about the market size, either, when teams like the Rays and Brewers exist. Look at the Cardinals. They never choose to gut the entire team and bottom out, even when they aren’t contending. 

If you are going to go that route, though, you’d better bounce back the way the Astros did. They’ve won two championships and played in four World Series in six years. It’s understandable that Elias would attempt to recreate that kind of success with a similar formula. 

The problem in putting the fans through all that wretched baseball is the reward needs to be the Astros-level payoff. Winning 101 games in 2023 was a ton of fun for them. Winning 91 games last season was fun, just not nearly as much. Not advancing in the playoffs and then looking miserable in 2025? Doesn’t exactly hit the same, does it?

So what was all the suffering for? Just to stockpile a ton of position-player prospects and then hold onto most of them for dear life instead of supplementing your pitching?

They did trade a few prospects for one year of Corbin Burnes. That was a great move. I loved it and still do. The Zach Eflin move was good. 

Acquiring Trevor Rogers via trade was catastrophically bad, though. 

Trades aren’t the only way to build a rotation, of course. It’s just that when there’s such a surplus of position-playing prospects, those can be used as currency to build a staff. 

Garrett Crochet was available via trade and has a 2.02 ERA and 56 strikeouts in 40 innings for the Red Sox. The Orioles could’ve beaten their offer to the White Sox and they could have done so last summer. Dylan Cease was traded to the Padres before last season and finished fourth in NL Cy Young voting. There was a thought that Tigers ace Tarik Skubal might’ve been available last July. Did the Orioles try to knock the Tigers over with a monster prospect package? We never heard reports like that. 

If not via trade, the Orioles could have better developed pitching prospects but they seem to have mostly failed there as an organization to this point, in terms of the big-league roster, aside from Grayson Rodriguez. He’s hurt, though. 

They could hit free agency better, too. Tomoyuki Sugano hasn’t been bad, but he’s not a frontline pitcher. Bringing in Charlie Morton at age 41 has been a predictable disaster. Thirty-seven-year-old Kyle Gibson is unplayable. 

The Orioles don’t swim at the deep end of the pool in free-agent bidding, but there are deals out there that were attainable for a contender looking to upgrade. 

Clay Holmes wanted to convert to starter and got a three-year, $38 million deal. He’s been lights out for the Mets. Lefty Matthew Boyd signed with the Cubs for two years and $29 million. Maybe the O’s didn’t want to go to four years, but Nick Pivetta signed for $55 million over that timeframe with the Padres. 

It just feels like a lot of swings and misses. Whether it was never developing enough pitching on their own or using what resources they had to grab better pitchers, the Orioles just didn’t do enough to supplement their offensive core on the pitching side during one of the most radical teardowns in the history of baseball. 

That’s all in the past now. Unfortunately, I don’t see a ton of winning in the Orioles’ near future. Given everything Elias put them through, he owed the fans more than this.