12:50pm: The Orioles have it official: Elias has been hired and given the title Executive Vice President and General Manager. He’ll be introduced by John and Lou Angelos at a press conference at 11am ET on Monday.
11:45pm: MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand tweets that “it is expected that Mejdal would join Elias in Baltimore” if Elias is indeed named general manager.
11:08pm: The Orioles long-running search for a new baseball operations leader could be winding to a close. Bob Nightengale of USA Today tweets that “barring a sudden change of heart,” Astros assistant general manager Mike Elias will be named the new general manager in Baltimore. Elias had previously been reported to be among the top candidates in the search.
Elias’ official title with Houston is “Assistant General Manager, Player Acquisition,” wherein he’s headed up the Astros’ scouting operations both domestically and internationally. Prior to holding that role, Elias served as the scouting director, and Houston’s media guide describes him as “a driving force” in the decision to select Carlos Correa with the top pick in the 2012 draft — a decision that surprised many at the time, given that Stanford righty Mark Appel was considered the consensus top player available.
Alex Bregman, Lance McCullers Jr., Kyle Tucker and Forrest Whitley are among the other top names selected during Elias’ run as scouting director, though successive top overall picks of Appel and Brady Aiken in 2013-14 were decidedly less successful. Appel (who re-entered the draft in ’13) is out of baseball, while Aiken went unsigned after some considerable drama surrounding his physical, resulting in Houston receiving the No. 2 overall pick as compensation in 2015 (a fortuitous turn of events in hindsight, as it led to the selection of Bregman).
Elias, 36 in December, broke into business as a scout with the Cardinals back in 2007 and quickly ascended to manage St. Louis’ amateur scouting operations by 2010. The relationship he developed with eventual Astros GM Jeff Luhnow while working with the Cardinals played a role in moving from St. Louis to Houston, where he’s been a part of one of the game’s most data-driven and analytics-focused front offices for the past several seasons. That’ll help him bring a more modern approach to the Baltimore front office, though his history in scouting and certainly allows him to appreciate the need for a diverse approach to player evaluation.
Elias’ background would check numerous boxes for an Orioles organization that former GM Dan Duquette admitted had fallen behind in a number of key areas, including international scouting and analytics. For years, the Orioles almost entirely ignored the Latin American amateur market, and while their international scouting efforts did net them some quality players — Wei-Yin Chen and Koji Uehara come to mind — the apparently ownership-driven directive to forgo the amateur market led to a perennially thin farm system. That’s seemingly changing now that Peter Angelos’ sons, John and Lou, have taken up a greater role in the organization’s leadership, but there’ll still be plenty of work to be done in terms of adding to the international scouting staff and facilities.
As for Baltimore’s R&D / analytics department, the team has already lost director of analytics Sarah Gelles — somewhat coincidentally to the Astros (as first reported by BaltimoreBaseball.com’s Rich Dubroff, on Twitter). That’ll only give Elias more hiring work to do in order to begin to get the department up to par.
As for the Astros, the loss of Elias would be significant. Houston already lost director of research and development Mike Fast, who took a position as a special assistant to Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos earlier this month. Beyond that, special assistant Sig Mejdal left the organization earlier this month after serving six seasons as one of the Astros’ top analysts. Houston’s coaching staff has also been raided. Bullpen coach Doug White jumped to the Angels as their new pitching coach, while assistant hitting coach Jeff Albert was hired as the Cardinals’ new hitting coach. Meanwhile, hitting coach Dave Hudgens was named the Blue Jays’ new bench coach late last week. Suffice it to say, Houston GM Jeff Luhnow and the remainder of his staff will have ample hiring needs in the coming weeks, while others in the organization could find themselves moving up the ranks with a promotion to fill some of the newly created voids.
First order of business – tank next five years …. sound familiar Astro boy?
But they’re already doing that.
Noted…4 years…
No, O’s should be better sooner than that.
No they shouldn’t
Yes they should. The farm has some interesting prospects—quite a bit of quantity. This is an outstanding move and it will maximize the non-elite talent in the system. I also look forward to seeing how guys like Bundy and Cobb especially develop this next year with the additional use of analytics as I think both guys can be very very good.
If you think all those “interesting prospects” are just going to get promoted and challenge in the ALE in under 5 years, you are going to be bitterly disappointed.
They can maybe push for a playoff spot in 5 years. As of now they have zero high impact prospect but that should change with 2-3 more bottom of the league results they’re destined for.
Not sure they need high impact prospects to do it. Like I said, they have some good (not great yet) prospects in their system — and many of them actually. So now it will be up to the new leadership to MAXIMIZE what they have. This leadership has proven itself very adept at doing that, which bodes well.
Keep in mind that this position, now filled, was a very desirable job throughout baseball. That doesn’t happen without some desirable things already being in place.
Every team has “intruiging prospects” I’d take Guerro and Bichette alone over the top 5 Orioles prospects. I think the best hope they have is to strike on their next few first round picks and be good by 2023-2025ish. They are in a similar position as the Royals, just with a bigger market.
Again you’re placing too much emphasis on some of the game’s top prospects. That’s nice but not a prerequisite to success.
Toronto is undoubtedly further along than the orioles are right now dimitrios. There’s no arguing that. Vlad Jr and Bichette are legitimate prospects who could be perennial all stars/game changers. Their next tiers of prospects are also very comparable to what we have in Baltimore if not slightly better at this point. We are making moves in the right direction but we will certainly not be competing in the ALE without a potential impact player of Vlad’s or Bichette’s kind of level. We don’t have that yet but we will be drafting in the top 5 for most likely the next 3 seasons. We are a ways off from being good again. We just won less than 50 games, there’s a reason for that and it’s going to be bad for awhile. We have quite a few potential mlb regulars in our system which is a good start but we won’t be competing against the likes of the Yankees or Boston with guys like that. We need another Machado, prime Chris Davis type of impact player. That guy isn’t in the orioles system right now.
Hey, losing for a reason is still a big step forward for the Orioles at this point.
Sounds good on paper
Everyone stealing the Astros staff lmao. Get your own.
Many of those executives originally started their jobs with different organizations.
Send Luhnow back to STL first.
Yes, but it makes you wonder why there was such a lack of longer contracts in place. That has had a great impact on the brain drain from Houston.
If there was a longer contract in place with these guys it would make no difference. MLB teams don’t hold executives back when they have the shot at a promotion elswwhere. Their contracts really don’t have much to do with that.
The Orioles held Dan Duquette from Toronto several years ago as he was under contract.
That wasn’t a promotion. It was a lateral GM move. I’m talking about the assistant GM to GM or the like. Teams don’t hold their guys back for that. If you’re going to be getting the same position elsewhere that’s a completely different story.
Victim of success
Everyone wants Dodgers, Red Sox and Houston personnel, and who can blame them!
It’s what’s trending. The next great teams will find themselves in a similar situation.
none of that personnel started out with those teams either
But has he passed his physical?
Bahahaha!
This definitely warrants an upvote. lol
He sneezed during his physical so The Orioles said “no deal”.
I’ve got an idea what this physical involves.
Not sure I understand—care to elaborate?
I think it involves being flexible
Funny—but O’s physical policy has been a very good one.
Mike Elias better hope he can pass the physical
In Phillies2017’s defense, both these posts were posted within 1 min apart. That’s life. I gave both a thumps up
People joke about the Orioles physical all the time, but the fact is that they have not been wrong even one time! If a player has failed, he hasnt played more than a yr or two before being out of baseball!!
A “failed” physical, for the purposes of FA signing or big trades, would have been a false positive, though, that is, rejecting a player b/c of an “injury” that really turned out not to be there. One has to think that there have been trades vetoed that they wound up regretting.
The whole failed physical joke started with Grant Balfour who after failing the O’s physical signed with the Rays b/c their doctors said he was fine. He played one bad season for them and then was out of baseball because of arm problems!
Arron Sele continued pitching after the orioles voided his contract.
Actually, after the O’s failed Sele he had one good year and the rest were awful!
He said they didn’t pitch but a year or two after the failed physical, my point was he pitched several years. Not that he pitched well at all
Let’s not forget Jamie Moyer.
Hopefully he gets them to spend more on INT FA
Fingers crossed but not this year. AL East is always more fun when Baltimore is in it
Another Ex-Cardinals staffer.
Damn , Wish they would have took Mozalock instead.
Pending physical.
What ever happened to Brady Aiken?, I know Appel was traded to philly then retired..
whatever happened to Brady Anderson?
Hopefully not the same thing that happened to Mike Brady.
Aiken last pitched in A-ball in the Cleveland system in 2017, walking 101 batters in 132 innings. Not sure why he didn’t pitch in 2018 but I can assume it was injury-related. He’s still only 21 so perhaps something becomes of his career, but it doesn’t look too promising. His elbow was shredded wheat before he was even drafted.
Kingmojo101…..
“Aiken missed all of the 2018 season due to injury. After going 5-13 with a 4.77 ERA last season, Aiken never got a chance to recover from an abysmal campaign, only making things worse by completely losing a developmental season.”
“2019 will be a last-ditch effort for Aiken to regain his past premier prospect form, or else he’ll soon join Mark Appel on the unemployed list.”
link to minorleagueball.com
Here’s my concern about Elias: he wasn’t good at drafting players.
This post is inaccurate: Elias wasn’t the scouting director who drafted McCullers, etc in 2012. Bobby Heck was the scouting director for the Astros drafts that built the team core. He was fired after the ‘12 draft. Once Elias and Mejdal took over in 2013, the draft results were usually awful. I know the draft is a crapshoot. And Elias seems bright. But the Astros were tanking and spent a ton of money on the draft and got very little in return most drafts during the Elias years.
So leave it to the O’s to sign up a GM who can’t identify talent…
I don’t think you are correct. Sportingnews is giving Elias the same years and credit for the same drafts and not just McCullers, just like MLBTR.
link to google.com
Ok, here is a link that appropriately gives Bobby Heck credit as scouting director for the Astros drafts through 2012:
link to mlb.com
I’m sure lots of people are eager to take credit for the 2012 draft as it was quite the haul. But Elias wasn’t making the picks. He didn’t take over until the atrocious 2013 draft.
This is what the article is talking about…direct from the Astros MLB website
“In 2012, as Special Assistant to the GM – Scouting, Mike was a driving force behind the decision to select Carlos Correa with the first overall pick, and helped assemble a draft class that has produced nine Major League players thus far.” link to mlb.mlb.com
Well, you expect the team’s own media guide to give credit to the director they dismissed a month after running that historic draft? It’s nice that he was a “force”, but the fact is Elias was not overseeing the 2012 draft. The first draft he ran was this gem:
link to houston.astros.mlb.com
That’s a $10M investment for…. Tony Kemp?
The post also gives Elias credit for drafting McCullers, which also is plainly not true.
Look, I’m sure he’s smart and qualified and better than Duquette. There’s just some sloppy reporting on his track record of drafting. Its not good.
I am not arguing that point or any other…I am simply saying that the statement made in the article was correct according to the Houston Astros website…it’s as simple as that. You are free to feel as you like. Have a nice day.
If you’re going to say the post is inaccurate you need to put an a better source than “Eyewash said so” in here
This is one of the dumber posts you will see on MLBTradeRumors… after pick #40, for each of these drafts, Elias and Lunhow selected a lot of good players… Elias and Lunhow also selected Bregman, Whitley, Kyle Tucker and JB Bukaakas in most recent years. All of which are doing very well in a strong farm system.
From 2009-2012, the Astros typically got 3 or 4 big leaguers a year in each of their drafts. Some of the big leaguers they drafted were just role players producing a few career WAR, but some turned out to be pretty good (Keuchel, Martinez, Springer, Correa, McCullers).
Look at drafts after Elias took over. Do you see 3 or 4 legitimate big leaguers in the 2013 draft, when he took Appel over Kris Bryant? Or 2014? The Astros’ drafting declined when he took over.
The astros also got good and aren’t drafting at the top of the draft anymore so it isn’t exactly apples to apples. His last draft with top picks he took Bregman at 2 and Kyle tucker at 5. Seems like two good picks there. then he took Forrest Whitley in 2016
Sarah Gelles leaves Baltimore for Houston. Yeah, because her analytic work had proved so indispensable for the O’s. Lol
A lot of dividing by zero when running analytics in Baltimore
And he’ll also likely hire Joe Espada as manager… raiding the Astros coaching staff even further.
Good hire. Much better than letting Luke Perry on Steroids run the team.
I guess he likes challenges lol
you go after the hot young jr. execs ……The Padres went after AJ Preller, who was very successful in building the Rangers farm system up so they could get to the world series two consecutive years. both the rangers and padres have struggled the last five years.
Thoughts and prayers
The brain drain continues.
Would you rather be general manager in Baltiomore -or- assistant (to the) g.m. in Houston?
There’s only 30 gm jobs. If you get picky, you get passed over.
If it’s just a baseball decision, it’s pretty much always better to take the promotion
Well this is a nice hire, so long as the first act by the new guy is to toss Brady Anderson out on the street.
And if Bobby Heck is REALLY the mind behind the good drafts, well, hire him too!
Bobby Heck was the scouting director who drafted Correra along w/Springer, Kuechel, JD Martinez, McCullers, Foltynewicz. Altuve was signed during that period – Ed wade’s regime wasn’t so bad after all.
First order of business – figure out a way to feasibly get rid of Chris Davis. Elias will earn a contract extension if he pulls that off.
They will have to just cut Davis. No one is trading for him