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Mike Elias (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
There are no consolation prizes to lessen the sting of the Orioles’ playoff sweep at the end of a 101-win, division-winning season.
If Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias was looking for them, the offseason acknowledgements—in the form of the Baseball America MLB Executive of the Year award—both for the 2023 team and the years of work that went into building it would certainly provide a silver lining.
“We had a tremendous regular season. There’s nothing to feel short about in the regular season, but our playoff goals have not been reached by any stretch,” Elias said.
“There’s still a lot of work that we can do to improve the Orioles, but (this award is) really meaningful and a really nice recognition, I think, of what was a hard job of rebuilding not just the roster but the organization.”
Elias was hired in November 2018 to overhaul a baseball operations department that had fallen behind in so many facets. The honors coming his way this winter are viewed through a multi-year lens and reflect the scope of the Orioles’ turnaround in his time in Baltimore.
Orioles ownership, he said, empowered the baseball operations to think and act differently.
Before he took over, Elias said the organization had been “relatively skewed towards external free agents, without any particular niche in player development, without really any international activity other than Asian free agents (and) kind of small, after-market signings in Latin America.”
Today, Orioles baseball ops fires on all cylinders, with a strong scouting and player development effort and a thriving analytics program
“It’s just a very different operating model, and it was necessary,” Elias said.
“I think our group’s experience and expertise enabled the Orioles to make that transition in a relatively tight window—with a global crisis in the middle of it. I think that’s the part that I’m most proud of, that we were able to pivot the capabilities of the organization and the philosophies of the organization. But it was a lot of hard work.”
The 2023 Orioles are a product of all that. Their lineup was a combination of carryover players, such as Anthony Santander, Cedric Mullins II, Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle, who improved through extended major league experience the lean years afforded them and upgraded hitting…