Orioles latest roster move should be the final straw for Mike Elias

At some point, the elephant in the room has to be confronted. Part of the reason why a team we thought was about to be a perennial contender in the Baltimore Orioles have fallen to the wayside in recent months has everything to do with the man who built this team. Mike Elias has had one bite at the apple after another with one top prospect after another. We have a team that cannot play at all!

I am not going to get into who is living up to lofty expectations and who is not in Baltimore right now, other than the fact the multi-year Heston Kjerstad experiment seems to have gone kaputt. Ahead of yesterday's game, the Orioles sent the struggling outfielder down to Triple-A Norfolk. Kjerstad had been the No. 2 overall pick by the Orioles out of Arkansas back in 2020. At 26, the game may be up.

This may have been his first year with the organization getting any serious run with the big-league club. Kjerstad did get a few cups of coffee with the team in 2023 and 2024, but he has been by far and away the worst player on the team so far this season. His WAR of -1.4 is by far the worst on the team, even more so than the ageless pitcher Charlie Morton. His .192 batting average is frightening.

We are talking about a 26-year-old former No. 2 overall pick who is hitting below The Mendoza Line!

Arkansas may be one of the best college baseball programs out there, but how did this all fall apart?

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Heston Kjerstad's demotion should be the end of the line for Mike Elias

The frustrating part about this for the Orioles is their former blue-chip prospect cannot hit water if he fell out of a boat. Baltimore has done its part to avoid him going up against left-handed pitching for the most part, but even then he is striking out almost a third of the time he steps up to bat. It took him three years to debut with the team out of college. Now five years later, he is heading back to Norfolk.

I will say this until I am blue in the face or on my deathbed. Prospects do nothing for me. Baseball is a game where the level of competition intensifies exponentially every time you go up. While I am not as firm on this stance in basketball or football, baseball is a game built on failure. Sometimes, players do not fail until the get to the final boss. It is an incredibly mental game that can render talent so useless.

Any time you have a front office executive who throws money or draft picks at a problem like Elias, it is bound to go poorly for them. A similar principle applies to managers who do not respect up-and-coming players and do not put them into advantageous situations to succeed. When you get to pick out the best groceries in the market, do not let them go to waste or give them to your moronic chef.

It is a professional's job to seek out vulnerabilities with the competition, as Kjerstad looks to be toast.