It’s as tired as a vaudeville act. Orioles president of baseball operations Mike Elias is the straight man, and the rest of us shout out the jokes that don’t make anyone laugh.
Instead of “Who’s on first?” it’s a little more like: “Who’s on the mound?”
That one-liner was already old when we heard it last season. That hasn’t stopped Baltimore from running back their not-so-greatest hits for an encore in 2026.
Even skeptics coming into this season still have to be alarmed by a four-game sweep in the Bronx that saw the Orioles trampled by the Yankees. Added to the ledger with their disappointing series against the Red Sox the weekend before, Baltimore is now just 1-6 against their AL East competition. The dream of them clawing back after the dismal 2025 campaign is not dead, but certainly significantly dampened, given an uncompetitive start and injuries continuing to pile up.
Here we are in May, where we’ve reached the part of the show where the sports columnist calls for a move — any kind of move — to save a season already going south quickly. I’ve delivered this line about Elias in 2024 and in 2025, so I know the cue.
Except, when you weigh this organization from top to bottom, I don’t know what Elias and his front office can do. The ends don’t justify the means.
Even though this entire rebuild may be on the line — not to mention Elias’ job — I’m not sure what the answer is short of an unlikely, totally internal turnaround that puts the ball club on track.
As Hall of Famer and broadcaster Jim Palmer described it: “I’m on life support but holding out for a miracle …”
It’s not a great place to be.
Let’s take a hard look, peeking through the fingers that have been covering our faces since this five-game slide began: The Orioles are 17th in OPS (.704) and have the seventh-most strikeouts. They have 23 errors, among the five most error-prone teams in baseball, and also have one of the lowest outs above average marks. Their shoddy defense exacerbates underperforming pitching, which is bottom-three in ERA and WHIP.
Ugly, ugly, ugly. And the front office’s fingerprints are all over it.
Some of the biggest underachievers include key draft picks, such as Colton Cowser and Coby Mayo. Heston Kjerstad is still sidelined with injury, but he wasn’t going anywhere before that. They trusted Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish as their aces, but so far both have failed to come close to those lofty expectations.
As great as it has been to see Adley Rutschman surge back after his struggles, Gunnar Henderson’s inability to return to MVP form is a continuation of the one-step-forward, two-steps-back nature of talent development for this franchise. Injuries are definitely affecting this ecosystem — they’d be better with Zach Eflin, Jackson Holliday and Jordan Westburg available — but after last season, patience for the injury excuses has worn understandably thin.
So what do you do? If you’re Elias, how do you save the Orioles?
Every obvious trade asset is in the tank. Mayo has been playing out of position and not hitting. Tyler O’Neill continues to disappoint. Ryan Mountcastle is hurt.
Do you trade a more significant player than those guys? If you put a core member (for the sake of argument, let’s pretend Rutschman or Henderson) on the block, that seems to acknowledge that your rebuild window is closing, if not closed already.
If you start dealing from the prospect pool you built up at last summer’s deadline sell-off, isn’t that just undoing what you said you were doing to rebuild the organizational depth?
Besides, what can those prospects fetch that will fix a team with the bottom-line problem that it lacks championship-level talent?
The answers to these questions, to me, seem to be: Nothing. You can’t. You shouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Not enough.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Orioles turn things around. If you look at their wins under manager Craig Albernaz, there have been a few gritty ones. If Henderson or Pete Alonso turns up, if Rogers and Bradish lock in, maybe a winning streak can come out of it that gets them out of the mid-spring doldrums.
But sustaining such a push strains credulity. The setback for Westburg’s recovery from an elbow injury suggests that this year will continue to be one in which the Orioles will look for stopgap solutions to profound problems. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair to judge this team based on spot starts from Cade Povich, Brandon Young and Trey Gibson while Eflin, Rogers and Dean Kremer are on the injured list, but sorry, folks — buckle up, it’s that kind of season.
Accountability won’t wait for the Orioles to get healthy. Injuries in 2025 didn’t stop the ax from swinging for Brandon Hyde last May. While Albernaz and his coaching staff still have a lot left to prove, their necks aren’t the next on the line. It’s Elias and his clique, who announced “liftoff” nearly four years ago and still don’t have a playoff win to show for it.
There were plenty of opportunities to take risks, and they took some — just never enough. They traded for Corbin Burnes in 2024, and signed Alonso this past offseason. They never followed up with more moves to supplement their headliners. They always stopped shy of pushing in their chips for the championship chase.
Now, their options have dwindled. The script for another disappointing season isn’t set in stone, but it’s starting to feel uncomfortably like the show we all saw last season.
It would be a great moment for a dramatic flourish — an unexpected twist that sets things on the right course, but it’s hard to see how that could happen without an actual miracle.
If the Orioles stay on this course, the only thing left for Elias is the hook. It’s only right. We know how this show ends already.
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