BALTIMORE – Nobody in the Baltimore Orioles organization is happy about how the season opened in the second year of David Rubenstein’s ownership.
“We just had an incredibly frustrating and disappointing start,” Mike Elias, the team’s executive vice president and general manager of baseball operations, said in an interview this week. “It was a Murphy’s Law kind of start.”
Everything went wrong as the O’s lost 32 of their first 47 games. Elias cited injuries, underperformance and players pressing for the face-plant that followed last year’s 91-win season.
“You name it,” he said. “It was all a contributing factor.”
The perception by fans as the season began was that the Orioles didn’t spend enough this offseason to improve the team. However their player payroll increased by $57.5 million. The issue? How they spent that money.
Of MLB.com’s top 25 free agents, Baltimore signed just one: outfielder Tyler O’Neill. And in an offseason where several high-profile starting pitchers were on the market—like Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Blake Snell and Jack Flaherty—the O’s filled their rotation holes with 41-year-old journeyman Charlie Morton and Japanese rookie Tomoyuki Sugano. Of their seven MLB signings, only O’Neill’s deal was for more than one year.
“Ownership made a lot of payroll investment this past winter,” said Elias. “Unfortunately, the first few weeks it didn’t bear fruit, but in their first offseason they showed a willingness to spend, and we were among the highest payroll escalations.”
The team so far hasn’t gotten much bang for its buck. Morton, the third-highest paid player on the team this season at $15 million, entered this week with a 6.05 ERA. O’Neill has been limited to two home runs across 24 games because of injury.
Local fans have responded. Average attendance is down 4,908 to 23,606 a game at Camden Yards, which ranks 22nd in Major League Baseball. The still-beautiful ballpark opened in 1992, leading a revolution of similar baseball stadium construction throughout the U.S., but has never hosted a World Series game.
That streak won’t end this year, barring a miracle turnaround story.
Charlie Morton has posted his highest ERA since 2010.
Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
Baltimore’s dismal start cost incumbent manager Brandon Hyde his job in mid-May. Only two seasons earlier, the O’s won 101 games and the American League East title, and Hyde was named AL Manager of the Year. He was replaced on an interim basis by third base coach Tony Mansolino, who had no MLB managing experience. Mansolino is 42, but looks and sounds much younger.
There was a lot of nervousness when he took over that first day, he said.
“You prepare, deal with the nerves, but then you settle in,” Mansolino said. “You try to do things the best you can … in the end it’s just having confidence in yourself like the players.”
The immediate results were predictable. The Orioles kept losing under Mansolino, hitting their season low of 15-32 on May 20. But what’s happened since then has given Elias hope. They’ve started playing better and winning as key players such as Cedric Mullins and Jordan Westburg have returned from injuries. They are over .500 since that low water mark, including a three-game home sweep last weekend of the Los Angeles Angels.
Still, the same problems they met out of the gates have popped up and hindered momentum. Baltimore’s pitching staff squandered an 8-0 lead to the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday night to lose, 12-8.
“We’re playing more relaxed,” Elias said. “We’re a healthier team now. We’ve received some stabilization from our pitching staff. And most importantly our young core of hitters has been improving. We haven’t quite dug out of the hole, but the team is very talented. Time is on our side a little bit.”
But time is not really on their side this season, playing in one of the toughest divisions historically in MLB. Making the playoffs is going to be a steep uphill climb, and every multi-run collapse like Wednesday night’s hammers morale.
Everything for the Orioles the rest of the way is going to have to go right, while other AL teams have to fall apart. FanGraphs gives Baltimore a sub-5% chance of making the playoffs. Baseball-Reference has the team at a sub-1% chance.
“I hope there is time,” Westburg said. “I prefer to look at the positives. It’s a long season and there’s a lot of things that can change between now and then.”
That doesn’t seem likely with the Rays, New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox above them by a solid distance in the division standings. As far as the three Wild Card berths, there are seven teams between the O’s and the final spot.
The roots of this year’s problems go back to last season. The Orioles were 58-38 at the 2024 All-Star break and boasted what many considered the top farm system in baseball. But the team was widely believed to need to bolster its rotation at the trade deadline, and the club hung onto its top five prospects and dealt for Rays starter Zach Eflin and Marlins starter Trevor Rogers. The latter posted a 7.11 ERA in four starts for the O’s before getting sent down to Triple-A.
“We accomplished our goals,” Elias said on MASN after the deadline. But the O’s faded down the stretch, going .500 in the second half and giving up first place to the Yankees for good on Sept. 6. Their 91-71 record was 10 games worse than 2023, but good enough for second place in the AL East and a Wild-Card berth. They were knocked out by the Kansas City Royals in two games, scoring just one run.
Adding their sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers in a 2023 AL Division Series, the Orioles haven’t won a postseason game or series since 2014.
Following its 2024 exit, Baltimore’s ace, Burnes, departed for the desert, signing a six-year, $210 million deal with his top-choice Arizona Diamondbacks. Without Burnes this year, and with Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish on the shelf, the starting rotation is near the bottom of MLB with an ERA above 5.20.
For his sake, Burnes just underwent Tommy John surgery on his right elbow and is likely out until the end of the 2026 season at best. Thus, the O’s sidestepped that disaster.
Now, with the clock ticking, the Orioles face another trade deadline decision. Of their young hitting core—Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Colton Cowser and Westburg—only Rutschman is earning more than $800K in 2025. Those bills will eventually become due through arbitration and/or potential extensions, so the franchise has more than just the upcoming second half to consider in its roster-building.
Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson has not matched his 2024 production.
Photo by Mark Goldman/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
In the meantime, the Orioles’ player payroll ranks 15th in MLB this year at $184.3 million, up from $126.8 million and a No. 26 ranking in 2024. Eight of the 15 AL teams spend less, but of course their AL East brethren in the Yanks, Jays and Red Sox don’t. Only Tampa Bay is way below them with a $101.5 million payroll, but Kevin Cash’s group is well above Baltimore in the standings and prevented the Orioles from gaining ground in this week’s four-game series.
“If you’re a middle-market team in baseball, just throwing money at your payroll over and over is not a particularly sustainable model,” Elias said. “You have to blend that in with good scouting and player development.”
As far as being a mid-market team, the Orioles are valued by Sportico at $1.82 billion with a 2024 revenue of $339 million, 18th in MLB. They must compete with the Yankees, who lead the sport in value at $8.39 billion, and are second in revenue at $799 million.
Rubenstein, who per Forbes has a net worth of $3.8 billion, and his group paid $1.725 million to buy the O’s from the Angelos family in March 2024. But there is a bright side.
The Orioles have a jewel of a ballpark in Camden Yards, which is about to undergo up to $600 million in improvements courtesy of state funds, including this offseason new outfield video boards, a ribbon advertising board circling the stadium and a new press box to replace the old one behind home plate—which to the chagrin of many writers is being converted into a luxury suite.
The club’s office space in the classic warehouse beyond the right field fence is also being renovated. And that’s just a start, as the entire facility is under evaluation. It all needs work, Catie Griggs, the club’s president of business operations, said in a dugout interview.
“The ballpark is iconic. It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s also largely untouched since it was built in 1992, which in some respects is fantastic, but in other places it’s starting to show its age.”
This offseason as well, the owners are spending $27 million of their own funds to upgrade the player facilities at their Sarasota spring training complex in Florida, much like the $30 million of work the Yankees just completed this year at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa.
Unlike the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays, the Orioles neither own nor operate their own ballpark, nor do they pay rent to the Maryland Stadium Authority to play there. They have recently signed a lease that commits them to the facility for the next 30 years.
They are a mainstay in the Baltimore area with a huge government subsidy from the state. Elias says ownership has indicated there is “payroll flexibility,” moving forward.
The Orioles may not have the revenue of big-market teams, but they don’t have the expenses, either.
To keep up with the Yankees and Red Sox, they must develop a symbiosis between business and baseball operations under the new ownership.
“I mean, that’s the name of the game,” Elias said. “I wish I could answer that simply. There’s an unevenness between franchises and market sizes in MLB that’s unique relative to other major league sports. Each franchise has to figure out the right formula.”
This season’s formula has not been right at all. The Orioles say they’re working on it.
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