Seven drafts, zero stars.

I feel bad for this team. Baseball is the hardest sport in the world because more effort does not produce more results, and you can see the effort. The pitching has been terrific for the last few weeks. The problem is that the Orioles cannot get offense, defense, and pitching to show up on the same night, and at 69-75 the 2026 season is over. Ownership spent this winter. Pete Alonso has been everything they paid for, with 33 home runs and a 140 wRC+, and if he had any protection behind him he would be better still. Outside of him, the outfield produces nothing, third base and shortstop are wildly inconsistent, the bullpen is hurt, and the best player on the field most nights is a utility man. That is not a managing problem or an effort problem. It is a talent problem, and talent problems belong to the front office.

When other teams sat at the top of the draft, they came away with franchise players. Baltimore came away with regulars. Adley Rutschman at #1 in 2019 was the consensus pick, but Bobby Witt Jr. went one pick later and Corbin Carroll went 16th, and Rutschman has now been traded to Boston for prospects without ever becoming the player a #1 pick is supposed to be. Heston Kjerstad at #2 in 2020 is indefensible: a signability reach who has been worth negative WAR while Garrett Crochet went 11th and Pete Crow-Armstrong went 19th. Colton Cowser at #5 in 2021 had one good year and has regressed since; Jackson Merrill went 27th. Jackson Holliday at #1 in 2022 has 1.5 career WAR while Zach Neto, a college shortstop taken 13th, is pushing 16. Enrique Bradfield at #17 in 2023 is a glove without a bat, still in Norfolk and still not on the 40-man roster, while Kevin McGonigle went 20 picks later and Nolan McLean went in the third round. Vance Honeycutt at #22 in 2024 went two picks after Trey Yesavage. You cannot have that much horsepower at the top of the draft and come away with nothing better than a solid regular.

Seven first-round picks with elite draft capital have produced, in total, roughly what one second-round pick has produced by himself.

Every homegrown hitter peaks in his first or second full season and declines from there. Rutschman put up a 131 OPS+ as a rookie and never matched it. Cowser was a 120 OPS+ hitter in 2024 and has been below average both years since. Holliday has never been an average bat. And Gunnar Henderson, who we still talk about as a superstar, has gone from a 155 OPS+ and fourth in the MVP voting in 2024, to 122 last year, to 99 this year, at exactly the age when he should be entering his prime. At this point 2024 looks like the outlier, not the baseline. He has led the league in errors at shortstop twice in the last three seasons and the bat is headed the wrong way. If this were a business chart, the trend lines on our most valuable assets are all pointed down, and the one hitter who left, Kyle Stowers, became an All-Star somewhere else.

Home runs do not make a hitter, and I think this organization has become so obsessed with launch angle and three true outcomes that it has forgotten what a good hitter looks like. Ichiro and Tony Gwynn were great hitters. The Orioles are a below-average three-true-outcomes team without the outcomes. And here is the thing: the numbers agree with the eye test. Henderson is not striking out more than he used to; his strikeout rate has been flat around 21 to 22 percent for three years. What has collapsed is the quality of his contact. His hard-hit rate has fallen from 54 percent in 2024 to 49 percent to 43 percent this year, and his average exit velocity is down more than three miles an hour. He is not swinging and missing more. He is hitting the ball softer. When something like that happens to almost every hitter who comes through the system, it is not seven separate personal problems. It is coaching and development. Elias provides the talent, and then the talent gets worse.

Then there is pitching. Every impact arm this team has had came from somewhere else. Kyle Bradish was a trade. Trevor Rogers was a trade. Shane Baz was a trade. The pitchers Baltimore could have had after its own first-round pick over these seven drafts include Crochet, George Kirby, Hunter Brown, Andrew Painter, Spencer Schwellenbach, Bubba Chandler, Cade Horton, Jacob Misiorowski, Nolan McLean, Trey Yesavage, and Payton Tolle. That is a rotation and a half. The free-agent record is no better: Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano, and Tyler O'Neill at three years and $49.5 million to hit .216. Elias did offer Ranger Suarez five years and $125 million and Boston matched it, so some of this is players saying no. But outside of Alonso, this front office has not made a free-agent addition that mattered in years. I'll come back to pitching below, because the numbers are worse than I thought.

Everyone points to Houston because that is where Elias came from and the Astros ran the same tank-to-draft model. Look at what they got out of it: Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, George Springer. Here is the part that stings. Elias was the Astros' scouting director for those drafts; Correa, Bregman, and Tucker were his picks. The same evaluator found stars in Houston and has found regulars in Baltimore. What he did not bring with him was the rest of the machine: a development staff that turned a seventh-round pick named Dallas Keuchel into a Cy Young winner, an international pipeline that produced Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier, and an owner willing to trade for Verlander and Cole. (Altuve, for the record, was a $15,000 international signing before the tank, not a draft pick.) Baltimore copied the draft model and left the other three parts in Houston.

I started out blaming the drafts, and then I started to wonder whether the real problem is development, because the picks keep arriving and then getting worse. So I tested it, and the answer is more specific than either. I looked at every hitter in baseball who was 26 or younger and had 200 plate appearances in back-to-back seasons for the same club, 2023 through 2026, and measured how much his wRC+ moved. The Orioles' young hitters changed by an average of minus 1.9 points. The league average was minus 1.4. That is the middle of the pack. Milwaukee was plus 0.9; Tampa Bay, for what it is worth, was minus 3.0. Baltimore's number includes Henderson's two big drops, but it also includes Holliday going from 63 to 96, Westburg from 97 to 125, Mayo from 95 to 104, and Basallo from 56 to 99. The trend line that scares me is really three players: Henderson, Cowser after 2024, and Rutschman until this year.

Best in the test: Milwaukee, +0.9. Tampa Bay: −3.0. This is not a development collapse — it is three players: Henderson, Cowser after 2024, and Rutschman until this year.

The reclamation projects tell the same story. Ryan O'Hearn was a waiver claim who hit at 118 for two straight years here and 128 last year. Ramon Laureano was a 90 wRC+ hitter the year before Baltimore got him, a 138 in his Baltimore season, and is an 86 in San Diego this year. Blaze Alexander is at 121. Cam Sanders had given up nine earned runs in nine outings for Pittsburgh before the Orioles bought him for cash in July; here he has a 2.81 ERA and a 31 percent strikeout rate. Whatever the big league coaches are doing with veterans, it works. And the theory that our guys get better when they leave is really just Kyle Stowers. Joey Ortiz went from 105 to 67 to 96 in Milwaukee. Connor Norby has been a 90 and an 89 in Miami.

The veteran fix works. The homegrown decline is a different machine.

Where Baltimore is unusual is at the top of the prospect list and at Triple-A. Three different Orioles entered a season as the number one prospect in baseball: Rutschman in 2022, Henderson in 2023, Holliday in 2024. Add Basallo and Grayson Rodriguez in the top ten, and Mayo and Kjerstad in the top 40. No organization has had that many elite prospects arrive in that short a window and produced zero stars from them. And the bat-first guys, Kjerstad, Mayo, Norby, Stowers, Beavers, all destroyed Norfolk and arrived as something less. The International League inflates numbers, and this hitting model (patient, pull-side, lift) produces hitters who look finished at Triple-A and get exposed by big league velocity and spin. That is the real minor league development problem: our Triple-A numbers have been a bad forecast for years, and the organization keeps believing them.

Put it together and the picture is a median outcome from top-of-the-draft inputs. Baltimore ranks 14th of 30 in 2026 WAR from young players, which is fine for a normal team and a failure for one that spent five years at the top of the draft. And look at where the good teams get it. Milwaukee is second in baseball, and 14.8 of its 24.2 young-player WAR comes from pitchers 27 and under. Pittsburgh gets 14.1 from young pitchers. Cleveland 13.6. Baltimore gets 5.0, and 3.5 of that is Shane Baz, who was drafted by Pittsburgh and developed by Tampa Bay. Which brings me to pitching.

We take pitchers late and assume we will develop them. The record says we do neither. From 2019 through 2024 the Orioles drafted 60 pitchers who signed. Four have reached the majors. Combined, they have produced 0.3 wins above replacement. The best arm Elias ever drafted, Nolan McLean, did not sign; he went back to Oklahoma State, went to the Mets a year later, and has 4.4 WAR. Over the same six drafts, Seattle's pitchers have produced roughly 34 WAR (Kirby, Woo, Bryce Miller), Cleveland's about 33 (Bibee, Gavin Williams, Cade Smith, Parker Messick), and Pittsburgh's 26 (Skenes, Jared Jones, Chandler). Boston and the Yankees, complete counts, are at 9 and 10.

It is not that the late picks fail. It is that the picks never come. Elias has never used a first-round pick on a pitcher. The first pitcher he took in 2019 came in the 8th round, 228th overall. In 2020 and 2021 it was the 5th round. The earliest he has ever gone is the second round, twice, and the 2025 pick, Joseph Dzierwa at 58, was the first real pitching investment in seven years. Thirteen of the 22 picks in 2023 were pitchers, twelve of them in the third round or later. This is a strategy: take bats early because they are safer, fill the back of the draft with arms, and let the development system sort it out. The development system has sorted out four of sixty.

So the staff gets built the other way. Of the roughly 1,280 innings the Orioles have thrown this season, 46 percent came from pitchers acquired by trade: Baz, Bradish, Rogers, Cano, Kremer, Povich, Sanders. Another 15 percent came from minor league free agents and waiver claims, 13 percent from major league free agents, and 11 percent from Brandon Young, an undrafted free agent. Pitchers Elias actually drafted threw 34 innings, less than 3 percent, and those belonged to Trey Gibson, a 7th-rounder with a 7.36 ERA, and Cameron Weston, one inning. The four-man core of the rotation, Baz, Bradish, Rogers, and Young, was drafted by Pittsburgh, the Angels, the Marlins, and nobody.

Here is the part that should sting, because it is the thing the Orioles are actually good at. Bradish was an Angels draft pick who has been worth nearly 9 WAR since arriving. Kremer came in the Machado trade and has 8. Cano was a throw-in from Minnesota. Tyler Wells was a Rule 5 pick. Rogers was written off in Miami and has been worth 6.6 WAR in a season and a half here. Baz is the newest version. This organization can take other teams' arms and make them better. That is the Rays' model, and for what it is worth, the Rays' own drafted pitchers from these same years have produced 0.7 WAR, almost as little as ours. The difference is volume. Tampa Bay and Milwaukee acquire young arms in bulk, every year, on purpose. Baltimore did it two or three times in seven years and only went big this winter, after the window had closed. You can build pitching by drafting it or by trading for it and fixing it. We chose neither, and then hoped.

Sparklines: OPS+ by season, 2023–26, against the league-average line (100). Not one of the eight is a top-five player at his position today.

So where does that leave us? Today the Orioles do not employ a single above-average position player that Mike Elias drafted. Not one homegrown player is a top-five player at his position. Jordan Westburg, the guy I love, has now missed most of two seasons. Blaze Alexander, a reactionary pickup made because the infield got hurt and because Coby Mayo cannot play third base, was one of the few bright spots until he broke his hand in July, and when a stopgap is your best move of the year, the stopgap is the story. The problem is not that Elias cannot find talent, and it is not that the coaches cannot make players better; the veterans prove they can. It is that the model picks hitters with a low ceiling, trusts Triple-A numbers that do not translate, and treats pitching as something that will show up on its own. Seven drafts with top-five picks, zero stars, zero pitchers, and a core whose trend lines all point down. We can argue about the manager all we want. It comes back to Elias not being very good at his job, and it is surprising that he still has it. It sucks to watch it play out.

Sources: Baseball-Reference (OPS+, WAR, fielding, advanced batting) through games of September 6, 2026; wRC+ figures via FanGraphs and Camden Chat; draft positions and outcomes from Baseball-Reference draft records; young-player and acquisition data from FanGraphs; rotation notes via The Baltimore Sun and Camden Chat. The Bottom Row No. 001 · bottomrowsports.substack.com · Written by a fan, for an argument. Bring your own numbers.