Baltimore’s efforts to improve the rotation last offseason were middling at best.
The Baltimore Orioles have lost seven straight to fall to 15-31 on the season. It has not gotten better since Brandon Hyde was fired over the weekend. This is the same O’s team, more or less, that won 101 games just two years ago.
Blame is easy to come by in this situation. It’s impossible to pin it all on a single person, whether that’s Hyde or one of the many underperforming stars in the Orioles lineup. That said, we can comfortably pin the most blame on GM Mike Elias, who did next to nothing to address Baltimore’s biggest weakness this past offseason.
It was one thing for Baltimore to lose the Corbin Burnes bidding war, which felt inevitable since the day that trade went through.
It was another thing entirely for Baltimore to completely neglect replacing him. Pitching has been the Orioles’ bugaboo in two straight first-round playoff exits, but Elias made no real effort to solve the problem in free agency.
Sean Manaea reveals just how little Mike Elias did to address Orioles’ rotation woes
The Orioles were never going to earnestly compete for top-of-market options like Corbin Burnes or Max Fried in free agency.
We can lambast them for a lack of aggression, but it was never going to happen. What is even more egregious was Elias’ apparent unwillingness to even consider that second or third tier of available starters.
He only gave out two one-year deals to starting pitchers — 41-year-old Charlie Morton at $15 million and 35-year-old Tomoyuki Sugano at $13 million.
New York Mets ace Sean Manaea was a revelation in the playoffs and thus a hot commodity in the free agent market. He wound up getting three years and $75 million to return to Queens.
That is not a small amount, but it’s a perfectly reasonable (and realistic) number for a potential No. 1 starter in a small market like Baltimore. And yet, according to Manaea, the O’s did not even place a phone call.
“I asked Sean Manaea if the Orioles reached out to him,” said ESPN’s Buster Olney. “He just kind of shrugged, ‘No.’ That blew my mind.”
Maybe this was an isolated case of disinterest, but it’s not unreasonable to extrapolate the data here. Baltimore not did make a serious play for any names in this tax bracket.
Jack Flaherty was basically given the cold shoulder. Nathan Eovaldi re-signed in Arlington for the exact same contract as Manaea.
He never really came up on Baltimore radars. What about A’s signee Luis Severino (3years/$67M)? Or Angels signee Yusei Kikuchi (3 years/$63.7M)? The O’s just let the whole market pass them by.
If Baltimore cannot pay to retain front-line stars but also can’t afford, like, second or third starters in free agency, then what is the path forward here?
Mike Elias still has only given out one multi-year contract as O’s GM, and that was the disastrous three-year, $49 million deal for Tyler O’Neill last winter.
Maybe that money would’ve been better spent on the rotation.
