Technology and rules changes eventually brought down the Deadball Era. The steroid era was drug-tested into oblivion.
And now, another of baseball’s scourges is on its last, dying breaths.
RIP to the Tanking Era, a particularly odious period of the game where extreme sucking and emaciated payrolls bred top draft picks and, eventually, a pivot to greatness.
The Houston Astros were the godfathers of it, the Chicago Cubs adopted it and those franchises won consecutive World Series titles in 2016 and ’17. One year later, an architect of the Astros’ burgeoning dynasty was hired in Baltimore as general manager as the Orioles were coming off a 115-loss season.
Yet Mike Elias was only just beginning to tank.
Like his headmaster in Houston, Jeff Luhnow, Elias stripped the roster to the studs and held the equivalent of multi-year open tryouts, producing grim baseball (108 and 110 losses in 2019 and 2021) and turning Charm City into a baseball ghost town.
Oh, the fortunes turned. Those high draft picks turned to gold, with the 2019 draft combo of Adley Rutschman (the reward for finishing 30th) and Gunnar Henderson (gotta love the massive signing pool that comes with 108 losses) signaling brighter days ahead with their arrivals in 2022.
A year later, the group won 101 games and the AL East, and Elias and his fellow Astros acolyte, Sig Mejdal, looked like they simply sprinkled some Old Bay atop the ol’ Houston recipe for success.
But tanking has its limits.
Eventually, the cynical art of losing to win must be replaced by executive acumen, and ownership support. And Saturday morning, Elias admitted the Orioles don’t have the goods.
Oh, Elias still has his job. Yet in firing manager Brandon Hyde, his hand-picked dugout leader and gravel-voiced executor of this new Oriole way, Elias has put himself on an island.
This is entirely his roster that staggered out to a 15-28 start and probably played its way out of playoff contention before Memorial Day. He has fallen on the sword at all appropriate times, including Saturday, when he said in a club-released statement that “the poor start to our season is ultimately my responsibility.”
And the Orioles’ record – as well as their future prospects – are evidence that rebuilding is one thing, but building a championship ballclub is quite another.
An arms deficit
Two things can be true: Elias, a fantastic scout who helped St. Louis and Houston stockpile championship cores, has his fingerprints all over an Orioles clubhouse that features three All-Stars 27 or younger: Rutschman, Henderson and infielder Jordan Westburg.
Yet he’s also the guy who, in assessing the club’s second-half offensive swoon, jettisoned a pair of hitting coaches only for the lineup to return even more flaccid this season, particularly with runners in scoring position, where its .192 average is last in the majors.
And he’s the guy who sent Hyde into battle with a pitching staff whose 5.31 ERA ranks 28th, and whose “big investment” – 41-year-old Charlie Morton, whom the Orioles are paying $15 million – is now out of the rotation with an 8.35 ERA and the club sporting an 0-11 record when he throws a pitch.
Certainly, both malfunctioning units can blame injuries for part of their woes. Zach Eflin, Grayson Rodriguez, Andrew Kittredge and Albert Suarez are on the IL, while Tyler Wells and Kyle Bradish are nursing arm reconstructions from a year ago. Westburg, Tyler O’Neill and Rookie of the Year runner-up Colton Cowser are or have been shelved from the lineup.
But it was Elias who centered the revamped lineup around O’Neill, a muscular 29-year-old who’s only managed to play more than 100 games twice in his career.
And it was Elias who only offered outgoing free agent ace Corbin Burnes a four-year contract – albeit worth $45 million per year – and failed to replace him. Who last year burned a pair of decent trade chips in Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers – the latter with 10 homers and a .938 OPS in Miami this season – for lefty starter Trevor Rogers, whose history of injury and ineffectiveness was visible to the layman.
The pitching paucity has been exacerbated by the club’s draft strategy under Elias, which is, essentially, don’t draft pitchers. The club did not draft a pitcher earlier than the fifth round in Elias’s first three drafts, and just 10 of their top 50 picks in all six of his drafts were arms.
It’s not the worst strategy, especially when drafting elite bats has yielded a farm system often bursting with offensive prospects, one of which – infielder Joey Ortiz – was flipped for Burnes. Yet while Elias once turned Dylan Bundy into Bradish, similar deals for Cade Povich and Chayce McDermott have not yielded rotation stability. And just one pitcher drafted in the Elias regime has thrown a major league pitch.
Last of their kind
The regime change from the Angelos family – which hired Elias and Co. – to David Rubenstein was supposed to bring peace and prosperity to the ballclub. But the GM and owner’s first winter together was a bad one.
Both their legacies are still just in the early stages. Yet in his first winter with cash to burn, Elias seemed bent on a strategy that’s addled many analytics-inclined GMs: To strike the most optimal deal or no deal at all. As Dodgers GM Andrew Friedman once said, sometimes you need to be a little irrational.
Meanwhile, Rubenstein couldn’t get to spring training without tossing “salary cap” into his vernacular.
All this came to roost for Hyde. He handled the dark years with grace, learning on the job but proving the rare rebuild manager who survives to see brighter days. He was the AL’s Manager of the Year in 2023, an honor earned through 101 wins yet also a nod to steering through the dark times.
Meanwhile, Elias will be tasked with hiring Manager No. 2, and the first of the Rubenstein era. Elias and Hyde seemed to work well together, and perhaps dismissing the manager was simply part of the life cycle of both jobs.
But as that reality settles in, just one question: Was it all worth it?
The Orioles put such an ugly product on the field that MLB and the players’ union essentially legislated away tanking: They installed a draft lottery in time for the 2023 season, so that there could be no consecutive top five picks, no award for sustained losing other than taking a number toward the back of the losers’ line.
That, more than anything, will kill tanking. So consider these Orioles the last of an era, enjoying the bounty of four top-five picks in as many years – yet without a playoff win to show for it.
Saturday, Hyde lost his job for it. Now, Elias will go it alone in his quest to prove he can do more than lose to win.
