How the Baltimore Orioles’ Call-ups Fueled One of the Quickest Turnarounds in Baseball History
Baltimore’s aggressive prospect promotions not only exemplify an emerging trend across MLB—they have also turned the O’s from cellar-dwellers to contenders in historically short order
In October 2019, I talked to Baltimore Orioles general manager Mike Elias for a new afterword to the paperback edition of my book about player development, The MVP Machine. The Houston Astros, Elias’s former team, were at the peak of their powers, still weeks away from becoming the team that everybody boos. The Orioles were near their nadir, having won 101 games in the 2018 and 2019 seasons combined. In Houston, Elias had been to the bottom of the standings, but it wasn’t clear that his new team could climb out of its self-deepened hole the way his old one had. Other teams had picked up the Astros’ non-trash-can tricks—tanking, shifting, helping players improve—and the tactics that had turned the intentionally terrible ’Stros into baseball’s best team could backfire or fail to pay dividends in Baltimore. “It scares me and it keeps me up at night to think about what some of these teams are doing,” Elias said, adding, “It’s intimidating for those of us that are trying to get there.”
Four years later, the Orioles are there. They just won 101 games in a single season, the most for the franchise since 1979, and though the Astros’ run is still going, the Orioles topped their 2023 total by 11 wins (albeit with an identical run differential). The Orioles just won one of the strongest divisions ever, and they’re the team that must most scare the AL East rivals that used to trounce them. The ’Stros are a sunset, the O’s a sunrise. And the new day that’s dawned in Baltimore illuminates a leaguewide trend toward prospects who come up earlier and produce right away.
Last month, FanGraphs’ David Laurila asked Yankees skipper Aaron Boone about the teams that most impressed him this season, mentioning that the Braves had been a popular response among other managers. “The Braves are great, yes,” Boone said. “But Baltimore, and what they’ve become over the last year-plus, kind of coinciding with Adley Rutschman getting called up … they’re really good.”
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