For the past three midseason trade deadlines, the Orioles have simply failed horribly. This past winter was more of the same. They sent away eight dependable players, in the hopes of getting back 15 or 16 I don’t know what’s.
I’m certainly not going to reward that inaptitude and pennypinching with my hard earned dollars. They past winter, they let Santander and Corbin Burns go and what did get back an injury prone nobody and a 41 year-old has been pitcher.
They wasted a year of Dean Kremer’s improvement on the mound. Coby Mayo better be hitting 30 homers next year to even come close to justifying Hearns, Urias and Mullins being gone.
2026 will be a complete restart of what the Orioles were in 2023.
It was not a success for Oriole fans, at least not for many long-term die-hards like me. After the injured players returned we were almost a .600 team. No reason to mess with that chemistry. Elias actually did a good job getting Rogers & Laureano & O'Hearn & a home-grown core of budding stars savings hundreds of millions (where are those savings?) by passing on Burnes & Santander. But now, for dubious reasons, it's a team that some of us might not live long enough to see win again. Being a dismal team for several years in order to be a very competitive team for 2 years was arguably not worth the despondence. It may be fun for mgmt. to constantly play fantasy baseball. But with starting over once again, going to the ballpark with the likelihood of watching the O's lose for 2 more years, while following AA games on your cellphone, just for the mere hope of 2 good years sometime after 2027 is not as fun an experience for fans as O's baseball should be.
E Rich Pennington - 7 months ago
Elias failed the team last winter. He failed by not signing at least one quality starter. I view this sell as an attempt to cover his butt.
All quality teams have to have a veteran base, to help anchor the whole team. As you can see by the erratic play,
Elais snatched the heart ,O'Hearn, and the Soul, Mullins, out of the team.
Elais should have been the one fired. How do you blame the manager when you don't get him the players needed to succeed. It's like trying to build a house out of cardboard. Might look good, but won't last.
E Rich Pennington - 7 months ago
Elias failed the team last winter. He failed by not signing at least one quality starter. I view this sell as an attempt to cover his butt.
All quality teams have to have a veteran base, to help anchor the whole team. As you can see by the erratic play,
Elais snatched the heart ,O'Hearn, and the Soul, Mullins, out of the team.
Elais should have been the one fired. How do you blame the manager when you don't get him the players needed to succeed. It's like trying to build a house out of cardboard. Might look good, but won't last.
Dwight Myers - 7 months ago
7 years ago, another talented Orioles team struggled. Fans were told rather than keep some good parts of the team the answer was to have a firewall and start over. We endured years of selling any capable players we had with the promise of future rewards. Other than Kremer are any of those wonderful returns on trades part of the team? Our reward for enduring those painful years- 0 playoffs wins from the light at the end of the tunnel. So now we do it again and start over? No thank you. There is no hope to compete next year. We have some good players but no support now thanks to Elias. By the time the fresh crop gets here the current left overs will be gone in more trades or free agency because we "can't" compete. The dream that we can use all these guys we just got in trades to land productive players for next year is just that, a dream. I've followed the Orioles for 50 years. But the Greed, lack of loyalty to a city and fans, and lack of concern for fans who can't even afford tickets or cable to watch have me at the point of losing interest all together. I'm not interested in more "rinse and repeat" until we get lucky...
Michael Mendoza - 7 months ago
FIRE ELIAS!!! Enough said!
Kirk McIntyre - 7 months ago
Young talent is great but only if you can keep them long enough to develop them and integrate them into an established lineup. By the time newly acquired talent materializes, the current core will mose than likely be gone as free agents elsewhere. There was no reason to let tenured players walk due to possibly being free agents next year. The Orioles are destined to always be developing talent , only to just give it away. We're tired of losing all the time. 2 promising years does not make up for 30 years of futility .
Laurence Berbert - 7 months ago
I voted "Yes" (because hope springs eternal), but in reality none of us will know for 2-3 years how the newly-acquired prospects pan out.
Jeffrey Deitz - 7 months ago
I can understand offloading relievers with expiring contracts, but disposing Kittredge, a dependable and reasonably priced arm with another year to go on his contract, decimates the bullpen to such a degree that even after quality pitching performances by Orioles starters, there is no major league bullpen to finish the game. Sure next year might be better, but now that GRod is gone the Orioles have essentially six months to create an entire pitching staff in time for opening day 2026. Who's left? Trevor Rogers and Dean Kremer, maybe Kyle Braddish,
No matter what, GM Elias has condemned Orioles' fans to watching two full months of late-inning destruction, game after game. What a CRUEL way to treat the fanbase. Shame on you!!
I want to know what the plan is and I think Orioles-nation deserves to hear about it from GM Elias.
Wayne - 7 months ago
Trading Lureauno andO’Hearn who were having career years is a good move. Getting rid of expiring contracts for something is a good move. If I told you we traded for an outfielder hitting .229 with 15 hr 34 walks and 85 strikeouts you woul not be happy. We traded that guy to the Mets. Love you Ced but we need better
PAIGE THOMAS - 7 months ago
I thought the intention was to acquire assets that could contribute in '26. However, of the 16 players obtained in the sell-off, only two have the potential to contribute in '26. The rest are two to three years out from being big league relevant, right about the time when the core players are headed to free agency. Unless Elias uses some of the new prospect as trade chips in the off season or acquires some top tier pitching talent from free agency, this team will be right back where it is this season in '26. The window for the O's to win is wide open NOW! It just feels like the talented young core of this team is being wasted for the lack of assembling the quality players and pitching needed to make the team whole.
Robert - 7 months ago
Every trade made was simply a means to justify Mike Elias's job. He actually has no clue how to manage a franchise. He's throwing darts at a dartboard and hoping something good happens a few years later. Baltimore's pitching is abysmal. Signing lousy pitchers for outlandish money reeks of desparation. The field manager is as clueless as the previous one as to how to manage a pitching staff. Analytics are his master. Until the owner wises up and boots Elias to the curb, this team will languish in perpetual mediocrity. Have fun Os fans, with another 'rebuild' dead ahead.
Richard Meara - 7 months ago
The Orioles are too young a team right now and lack mature players who have consistently won before elsewhere to take the pressure off of them. They missed Santander or a Santander like player earlier this year. If you look at teams who are consistently winning long term they have a balance of young and old players as well as a star who comes through in the clutch and takes the pressure off of the younger players. Confidence should come as current players get older but not for a while certainly not next year in all probability. In my opinion Elias is excellent at drafting and evaluating talent not composing a whole team
MIchael Stefanek - 7 months ago
The Os have problems on offense and pitching. I look at the seasons performance for every pitcher with more than a dozen starts and the stats are just awful. We have no #1 or even #2 starters for sure-and maybe no solid #3 starter. How are they fixing that for next year? Relying on "prospects" it seems or trying some of the current starters with terrible ERAs and WHIPs.
Nancy - 7 months ago
Disappointing to watch now.
Mike Elias is reminding me of Dan Duquet and the questionable decisions he made years ago under previous owners.
I thought David Rubinstein would have hired better people.
The inexperienced temporary Manager is no better than Brandon Hyde.
Find Terry Crowley and bring him back to help the hitting coach, who doesn't know how to teach them how to hit the ball in the field where the fielders aren't playing like he did.
Mike Kucharski - 7 months ago
Really needed a don't know option. None of the trades were made to improve the team this year or even next year. With all the prospects we picked up it's going to be 3 - 4 years before we know if the trades we made were successful. There is still a lot of work to be done this off-season to improve the team for 2026.
John Kaiser - 7 months ago
@Dave. I'm a big O's fan and I don't agree with you. Come on; of course the reason Elias made those moves is money. Why else is there a ballclub?I mean, if the team wasn't run as a business, then even if you would be provided with some "fun" or entertainment, it wouldn't last long if it wasn't profitable. wake up and smell the coffee. I think the prospects we gained will help form us a very good team, that's bult on the young talent we have already.
Douglas Meilander - 7 months ago
It seems to me that most of the players traded were not going to be signed for 2026, and if we had waited until they were free agents, we would get nothing for them. And for their sake, they get to play the rest of this season with winning teams. A could of players were under team control for another year, but I think that (except for Urias) they were not part of the Orioles plan for the future. We've had a very unhappy season. I hope the current players demonstrate how ]good they are. Also I hope that in the off season Elias gets some serious help for the bullpen, as well as 2 seriously good starting pitchers.
Bud Campbell - 7 months ago
We traded away half the team for the slight chance we'll see one of these kids in three years or more. It was "lift off" two years ago, and look at us now.
Carc Muck - 7 months ago
Last I looked the baseball season ends at the end of September. Giving up in July on a team that was just single digit games out of a wildcard playoff spot (and is due to get quite a few players back from the IR) is not good for the fans, not good for the players remaining on the team and not good for baseball in general. We had a record of 50-58 and were 7 games back of a mediocre Seattle team for the last playoff spot just before the rug was pulled out from under the team. You have to go all the way back to last season to find a team in a similar spot that ends up making the playoffs. In 2024 the Detroit Tigers were 52-57 at the end of July and 5 games out of the last playoff spot and ended up beating out the Seattle Mariners for the playoffs. It seems ridiculous to me that a professional sports team with as much talent as the O's stops trying to compete with over 50 games left to go! That's almost 1/3 of the season!
Buck Powden - 7 months ago
If I would go to work unable to physically perform my duties I would get sent home. What are these trainers not seeing in all of these injuries, last year and this year? Why can't these hitting coaches teach and improve hitting skills? Why did Jackson Holliday have to go outside the organization for tips on improving his hitting? Pitching is no different. What are these pitching coaches teaching, or better yet, what aren't they teaching? Why is Grayson Rodriguez a career prone injured person? Reminds me of Hunter Harvey early on. It seems like every game there are run scoring errors costing the O's games. Yesterday a routine fly ball off the first batter resulted in 2 unearned runs. Brandon Young pitched as well as he could and we would have won a regulation 9 inning game had it not been for a dropped pop up in right field. A week or so ago I witnessed 2 different infielders making errant throws to the plate resulting in runs scored for the opposing team. My reply is "And that's why you're in last place."
Ed Dolbow - 7 months ago
The Orioles have a fundamental problem with their pitching staff. One, they have been unable to draft and develop pitching talent. Two, they have been unable to sign and develop international prospects. Three, they have had some success developing prospects they acquired in trades, e.g. Bradish, but nothing that leads me to think their farm system is that good with regards to pitching. Getting a bunch of pitching prospects in these trades sounds good but if the Orioles cannot develop pitching talent the new group will not help the team or result in valuable trade chips. I am tired of watching the Orioles tank either for a full season or at the trade deadline. It has been 6 out of 8 years.
walter pindell - 7 months ago
need a "not sure" category because let's face it..none of us know..Elias included
Dave Hebler - 7 months ago
No way should this have happened? I agree that the cheap skate Orioles saved money with players who were on a one year contract by trading them but we got here because Charlie Morton threw away his first 8+ starts and we we had more injuries than I've seen in one year in my life time!
So I have three questions?
We fired the manager and put in a guy no doubt at a lesser salary who had little to no experience? Why?
We should have been looking at the physical trainers three months ago when we started seeing injuries because clearly our players were getting hurt because they weren't prepared? Why didn't we?
And why did we need to get rid of so many players, destroying the moral in the clubhouse and losing key pieces that would have been with us next year? Money!!
I've watched the Orioles back to Memorial stadium. I've seen this kind of intentional destruction of the team before. The owner and his bobblehead have now taken this team down a path that will take a decade to fix! Not just because he won't spend the money but because our farm system is a disaster!
And in conclusion we got diddly squat for all those "trades" except Rubenstein put some money back in his wallet.
I actually have tickets to a Shorebirds game in early September.
They usually lose a lot too but between now and then they'll probably win more than the Orioles after the intentional destruction of our home team!
There's not much we can do about the penny pinching owner but the first thing we should have done even before firing the manager is FIRE Elias!!!
Dale Summers - 7 months ago
The O's purged themselves of some expiring contracts on basically average players and restocked their farm teams, which can now potentially be used as bait to trade for starting pitching. The Laureano and Urias trades were a bit head scratching since each still were under team control for at least another year at reasonable salaries (Kittredge also) , but we can hope the returns turn out worth it. Sad to see a promising season end up this way.
For the past three midseason trade deadlines, the Orioles have simply failed horribly. This past winter was more of the same. They sent away eight dependable players, in the hopes of getting back 15 or 16 I don’t know what’s.
I’m certainly not going to reward that inaptitude and pennypinching with my hard earned dollars. They past winter, they let Santander and Corbin Burns go and what did get back an injury prone nobody and a 41 year-old has been pitcher.
They wasted a year of Dean Kremer’s improvement on the mound. Coby Mayo better be hitting 30 homers next year to even come close to justifying Hearns, Urias and Mullins being gone.
2026 will be a complete restart of what the Orioles were in 2023.
It was not a success for Oriole fans, at least not for many long-term die-hards like me. After the injured players returned we were almost a .600 team. No reason to mess with that chemistry. Elias actually did a good job getting Rogers & Laureano & O'Hearn & a home-grown core of budding stars savings hundreds of millions (where are those savings?) by passing on Burnes & Santander. But now, for dubious reasons, it's a team that some of us might not live long enough to see win again. Being a dismal team for several years in order to be a very competitive team for 2 years was arguably not worth the despondence. It may be fun for mgmt. to constantly play fantasy baseball. But with starting over once again, going to the ballpark with the likelihood of watching the O's lose for 2 more years, while following AA games on your cellphone, just for the mere hope of 2 good years sometime after 2027 is not as fun an experience for fans as O's baseball should be.
Elias failed the team last winter. He failed by not signing at least one quality starter. I view this sell as an attempt to cover his butt.
All quality teams have to have a veteran base, to help anchor the whole team. As you can see by the erratic play,
Elais snatched the heart ,O'Hearn, and the Soul, Mullins, out of the team.
Elais should have been the one fired. How do you blame the manager when you don't get him the players needed to succeed. It's like trying to build a house out of cardboard. Might look good, but won't last.
Elias failed the team last winter. He failed by not signing at least one quality starter. I view this sell as an attempt to cover his butt.
All quality teams have to have a veteran base, to help anchor the whole team. As you can see by the erratic play,
Elais snatched the heart ,O'Hearn, and the Soul, Mullins, out of the team.
Elais should have been the one fired. How do you blame the manager when you don't get him the players needed to succeed. It's like trying to build a house out of cardboard. Might look good, but won't last.
7 years ago, another talented Orioles team struggled. Fans were told rather than keep some good parts of the team the answer was to have a firewall and start over. We endured years of selling any capable players we had with the promise of future rewards. Other than Kremer are any of those wonderful returns on trades part of the team? Our reward for enduring those painful years- 0 playoffs wins from the light at the end of the tunnel. So now we do it again and start over? No thank you. There is no hope to compete next year. We have some good players but no support now thanks to Elias. By the time the fresh crop gets here the current left overs will be gone in more trades or free agency because we "can't" compete. The dream that we can use all these guys we just got in trades to land productive players for next year is just that, a dream. I've followed the Orioles for 50 years. But the Greed, lack of loyalty to a city and fans, and lack of concern for fans who can't even afford tickets or cable to watch have me at the point of losing interest all together. I'm not interested in more "rinse and repeat" until we get lucky...
FIRE ELIAS!!! Enough said!
Young talent is great but only if you can keep them long enough to develop them and integrate them into an established lineup. By the time newly acquired talent materializes, the current core will mose than likely be gone as free agents elsewhere. There was no reason to let tenured players walk due to possibly being free agents next year. The Orioles are destined to always be developing talent , only to just give it away. We're tired of losing all the time. 2 promising years does not make up for 30 years of futility .
I voted "Yes" (because hope springs eternal), but in reality none of us will know for 2-3 years how the newly-acquired prospects pan out.
I can understand offloading relievers with expiring contracts, but disposing Kittredge, a dependable and reasonably priced arm with another year to go on his contract, decimates the bullpen to such a degree that even after quality pitching performances by Orioles starters, there is no major league bullpen to finish the game. Sure next year might be better, but now that GRod is gone the Orioles have essentially six months to create an entire pitching staff in time for opening day 2026. Who's left? Trevor Rogers and Dean Kremer, maybe Kyle Braddish,
No matter what, GM Elias has condemned Orioles' fans to watching two full months of late-inning destruction, game after game. What a CRUEL way to treat the fanbase. Shame on you!!
I want to know what the plan is and I think Orioles-nation deserves to hear about it from GM Elias.
Trading Lureauno andO’Hearn who were having career years is a good move. Getting rid of expiring contracts for something is a good move. If I told you we traded for an outfielder hitting .229 with 15 hr 34 walks and 85 strikeouts you woul not be happy. We traded that guy to the Mets. Love you Ced but we need better
I thought the intention was to acquire assets that could contribute in '26. However, of the 16 players obtained in the sell-off, only two have the potential to contribute in '26. The rest are two to three years out from being big league relevant, right about the time when the core players are headed to free agency. Unless Elias uses some of the new prospect as trade chips in the off season or acquires some top tier pitching talent from free agency, this team will be right back where it is this season in '26. The window for the O's to win is wide open NOW! It just feels like the talented young core of this team is being wasted for the lack of assembling the quality players and pitching needed to make the team whole.
Every trade made was simply a means to justify Mike Elias's job. He actually has no clue how to manage a franchise. He's throwing darts at a dartboard and hoping something good happens a few years later. Baltimore's pitching is abysmal. Signing lousy pitchers for outlandish money reeks of desparation. The field manager is as clueless as the previous one as to how to manage a pitching staff. Analytics are his master. Until the owner wises up and boots Elias to the curb, this team will languish in perpetual mediocrity. Have fun Os fans, with another 'rebuild' dead ahead.
The Orioles are too young a team right now and lack mature players who have consistently won before elsewhere to take the pressure off of them. They missed Santander or a Santander like player earlier this year. If you look at teams who are consistently winning long term they have a balance of young and old players as well as a star who comes through in the clutch and takes the pressure off of the younger players. Confidence should come as current players get older but not for a while certainly not next year in all probability. In my opinion Elias is excellent at drafting and evaluating talent not composing a whole team
The Os have problems on offense and pitching. I look at the seasons performance for every pitcher with more than a dozen starts and the stats are just awful. We have no #1 or even #2 starters for sure-and maybe no solid #3 starter. How are they fixing that for next year? Relying on "prospects" it seems or trying some of the current starters with terrible ERAs and WHIPs.
Disappointing to watch now.
Mike Elias is reminding me of Dan Duquet and the questionable decisions he made years ago under previous owners.
I thought David Rubinstein would have hired better people.
The inexperienced temporary Manager is no better than Brandon Hyde.
Find Terry Crowley and bring him back to help the hitting coach, who doesn't know how to teach them how to hit the ball in the field where the fielders aren't playing like he did.
Really needed a don't know option. None of the trades were made to improve the team this year or even next year. With all the prospects we picked up it's going to be 3 - 4 years before we know if the trades we made were successful. There is still a lot of work to be done this off-season to improve the team for 2026.
@Dave. I'm a big O's fan and I don't agree with you. Come on; of course the reason Elias made those moves is money. Why else is there a ballclub?I mean, if the team wasn't run as a business, then even if you would be provided with some "fun" or entertainment, it wouldn't last long if it wasn't profitable. wake up and smell the coffee. I think the prospects we gained will help form us a very good team, that's bult on the young talent we have already.
It seems to me that most of the players traded were not going to be signed for 2026, and if we had waited until they were free agents, we would get nothing for them. And for their sake, they get to play the rest of this season with winning teams. A could of players were under team control for another year, but I think that (except for Urias) they were not part of the Orioles plan for the future. We've had a very unhappy season. I hope the current players demonstrate how ]good they are. Also I hope that in the off season Elias gets some serious help for the bullpen, as well as 2 seriously good starting pitchers.
We traded away half the team for the slight chance we'll see one of these kids in three years or more. It was "lift off" two years ago, and look at us now.
Last I looked the baseball season ends at the end of September. Giving up in July on a team that was just single digit games out of a wildcard playoff spot (and is due to get quite a few players back from the IR) is not good for the fans, not good for the players remaining on the team and not good for baseball in general. We had a record of 50-58 and were 7 games back of a mediocre Seattle team for the last playoff spot just before the rug was pulled out from under the team. You have to go all the way back to last season to find a team in a similar spot that ends up making the playoffs. In 2024 the Detroit Tigers were 52-57 at the end of July and 5 games out of the last playoff spot and ended up beating out the Seattle Mariners for the playoffs. It seems ridiculous to me that a professional sports team with as much talent as the O's stops trying to compete with over 50 games left to go! That's almost 1/3 of the season!
If I would go to work unable to physically perform my duties I would get sent home. What are these trainers not seeing in all of these injuries, last year and this year? Why can't these hitting coaches teach and improve hitting skills? Why did Jackson Holliday have to go outside the organization for tips on improving his hitting? Pitching is no different. What are these pitching coaches teaching, or better yet, what aren't they teaching? Why is Grayson Rodriguez a career prone injured person? Reminds me of Hunter Harvey early on. It seems like every game there are run scoring errors costing the O's games. Yesterday a routine fly ball off the first batter resulted in 2 unearned runs. Brandon Young pitched as well as he could and we would have won a regulation 9 inning game had it not been for a dropped pop up in right field. A week or so ago I witnessed 2 different infielders making errant throws to the plate resulting in runs scored for the opposing team. My reply is "And that's why you're in last place."
The Orioles have a fundamental problem with their pitching staff. One, they have been unable to draft and develop pitching talent. Two, they have been unable to sign and develop international prospects. Three, they have had some success developing prospects they acquired in trades, e.g. Bradish, but nothing that leads me to think their farm system is that good with regards to pitching. Getting a bunch of pitching prospects in these trades sounds good but if the Orioles cannot develop pitching talent the new group will not help the team or result in valuable trade chips. I am tired of watching the Orioles tank either for a full season or at the trade deadline. It has been 6 out of 8 years.
need a "not sure" category because let's face it..none of us know..Elias included
No way should this have happened? I agree that the cheap skate Orioles saved money with players who were on a one year contract by trading them but we got here because Charlie Morton threw away his first 8+ starts and we we had more injuries than I've seen in one year in my life time!
So I have three questions?
We fired the manager and put in a guy no doubt at a lesser salary who had little to no experience? Why?
We should have been looking at the physical trainers three months ago when we started seeing injuries because clearly our players were getting hurt because they weren't prepared? Why didn't we?
And why did we need to get rid of so many players, destroying the moral in the clubhouse and losing key pieces that would have been with us next year? Money!!
I've watched the Orioles back to Memorial stadium. I've seen this kind of intentional destruction of the team before. The owner and his bobblehead have now taken this team down a path that will take a decade to fix! Not just because he won't spend the money but because our farm system is a disaster!
And in conclusion we got diddly squat for all those "trades" except Rubenstein put some money back in his wallet.
I actually have tickets to a Shorebirds game in early September.
They usually lose a lot too but between now and then they'll probably win more than the Orioles after the intentional destruction of our home team!
There's not much we can do about the penny pinching owner but the first thing we should have done even before firing the manager is FIRE Elias!!!
The O's purged themselves of some expiring contracts on basically average players and restocked their farm teams, which can now potentially be used as bait to trade for starting pitching. The Laureano and Urias trades were a bit head scratching since each still were under team control for at least another year at reasonable salaries (Kittredge also) , but we can hope the returns turn out worth it. Sad to see a promising season end up this way.