The Baltimore Orioles entered the 2025 campaign with postseason hopes, which made their subsequent slide to the bottom of the standings all the more frustrating. Not all of it was within Baltimore's control — injuries were a constant all year — but a lot of it boils down to poor roster construction and maddening underperformance.
Mike Elias clearly deserves the brunt of the blame. We don't need to beat around the bush. His free agent disasterclass went far beyond failing to re-sign Corbin Burnes. Rather than ramping up aggression after the Burnes whiff and leveraging the alleged spending power afforded by Baltimore's ownership, Elias fell back into bad habits. He poked around the fringes of the marketplace, signing past-prime vets like Charlie Morton to one-year deals and failing to deliver sustainable results.
Nobody could have predicted such a sharp and sudden decline, but Baltimore certainly did not protect itself against injuries or really any of the usual trials and tribulations that come with a 162-game regular season. Firing Brandon Hyde was an understandable knee-jerk reaction to a slow start, but Tony Mansolino hasn't delivered tangibly better results. It felt more like Elias was pinning the blame elsewhere, rather than looking inward. Typical front office behavior, essentially.
Now an important offseason looms on the horizon. The O's are still a talented group with a bunch of promising players speed-running through the farm system. There is a world in which Baltimore is right back in the AL East driver's seat next summer, but it will require a different mindset from Elias and the front office. It will require hammering the pitching market in free agency and spending like a contender, rather than a small-market curiosity.
Better yet: Baltimore would do well to ensure that these players don't end up in rival hands, although such an outcome feels distinctly possible.
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