The thing about the 2026 Orioles is that they can always manage to fool you for a little while into believing that they might be able to turn things around. The best version of this team really is good enough. Mike Elias wasn’t wrong to assess that. The problem, as was unfortunately demonstrated in increasingly ridiculous ways over the last week, is that they aren’t the best version often enough, and when they’re bad, they’re embarrassingly bad.
There is a tragic element to it all, tragic in the Greek
sense that is fresher on many people’s minds since Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is proving to be a popular sensation. It’s got me thinking about how frequently the gods of Greek myth were known to punish mortals for their hubris, and wondering just how much Elias’s roster-building philosophy embodies that hubris.
This takes on a variety of forms, which I get into in this episode, but the real hubris seems to be thinking that a team where nearly every hitter is one of his precious high draft picks is going to be able to be good enough to be a winner, even though they have now spent the past three seasons demonstrating to us that this is not the case.
Listen to this week’s episode here:
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How are you feeling about the way things are going with the Orioles right now? Answers could make it into the mailbag section of a future episode of the podcast.
