In one quote, Mike Elias spelled out the Orioles' new reality. What does it mean?
This weekend at the Birdland Caravan, Elias' comments about the team's expectation and reality had a lot to unpack.
One of the great challenges (or, depending on one’s perspective, difficulties) of the Orioles’ offseason has been grasping and understanding the way this team is going to be built and operate in an ex-rebuild station.
Those who long for the returns of $150 million payrolls, while not likely to be satisfied, will probably object to the notion that expectations were ever reset at all. In reality, around the time the Orioles shipped out Jonathan Villar and Dylan Bundy in the space of a week in December 2019, it should have been clear that until further notice the operating procedure was going to be to shed as many players making above the minimum as possible and
Trey Mancini and Jorge Lopez can attest to that policy still existing through last season, but no matter what liftoff actually meant, one thing it did do was hopefully signal an end to that as the overriding principal.
But when discussing this new era of Orioles baseball with actual expectations last week, Mike Elias pretty thoroughly laid out what the organization’s transition into this competitive phase will be defined by.
“The front office and the manager, when we talk to media, we feed those expectations, but we also live in the reality of our business. We approach things very carefully. We have a lot of really smart and experienced people in our front office working on our plan, and that includes growing the team over the next few years, managing our payroll, trying to get into contracts that make sense for the long haul. So, we’ve got to navigate all those factors, too, and it’s something that I think a team like the Orioles in particular has to be careful about. There’s a lot that goes into it. The bottom line is we want to do the best we can in our situation and we want to win, and so, everything we’ve done since going back to 2018 has been about getting us to that point. We’re going to continue applying our know-how to take the next step.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s get to it.