'Astroball' a Failure in Baltimore?

The Baltimore Orioles are a Major League Baseball franchise in crisis. It has been 43 years since they last won a World Series, back when they were a consistently competitive franchise year after year. That was nearly half a century ago.

After the latest collapse of a promising team in 2017, followed by an ugly start in 2018, then-general manager Dan Duquette blew up the roster and traded away almost anyone of value, including budding superstar Manny Machado, for prospects. Duquette's own contract expired at the end of that season, and the Orioles turned to Mike Elias as their new general manager.

Elias came with an impressive résumé. A Yale graduate and college pitcher whose playing career was cut short by injury, he had become a successful scout with the St. Louis Cardinals before moving to the Houston Astros, where he led player development. Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer turned baseball analyst, had also worked with the Cardinals before joining the Astros. Together, Elias and Mejdal became associated with the data-driven revolution in baseball operations that helped transform Houston into a powerhouse. The Astros' continuing success came to be known as "Astroball." (Astroball was the title of a book by sports writer Ben Rein, published in 2019, about Elias and Mejdal's roles in building the team into a World Series champion).

The Orioles needed exactly that kind of top-to-bottom transformation. Elias was hired to build it, and he brought Mejdal with him as chief analyst.

Elias and Mejdal built up international scouting and development, including establishing a state-of-the-art facility in the Dominican Republic. Because the Orioles were so bad early in the rebuild, they also benefited from high draft picks. Before long, pundits widely regarded Baltimore as having one of the best farm systems in baseball. The Orioles drafted and developed a long list of highly touted position players, including Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Colton Cowser, Jordan Westburg, Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo, Heston Kjerstad, Dylan Beavers, and Sam Basallo.

It looked like liftoff.

The Orioles posted their first winning season in five years in 2022. Elias declared that it was "liftoff from here." In 2023, the Orioles won 101 games and captured the AL East, only to get swept in the first round of the playoffs. In 2024, they won 10 fewer games but still reached the postseason as a Wild Card team. Once again, they were swept in the first round.

Then came 2025. Instead of building on their success, the Orioles stumbled badly out of the gate, never recovered, and finished in last place.

Now, in 2026, they are stumbling again.

They are not in last place yet; as of this writing, they are a game and a half ahead of the Red Sox. But that's where they are heading. Over the last four games, Orioles hitters have struck out 11, 16, 12, and 14 times. In nearly half of their games so far this season, Orioles hitters have struck out 11 times or more. With few exceptions, and regardless of count or situation, Orioles hitters seem determined to swing as hard as they can, with little discernible interest in spraying the ball around the field, shortening up, or hitting the other way.

Astroball appears to have gone off the rails in Baltimore.

The Orioles were supposed to become a sustainable contender built on elite drafting and player development. Instead, too many of their young hitters have arrived in the majors looking one-dimensional, inconsistent, or simply bad.

Gunnar Henderson, perhaps their best player, has hit 7 home runs so far in 2026, but he is batting just .196 with a .282 on-base percentage. Those aren't stats a franchise cornerstone should be carrying for any length of time.

Here are the rest of the rookie class's performance with their career number of games (G), batting average (BA), and On Base Percentage (OBP) so far (and their current age in parenthesis):

Adley Rutschman (28): 515 G, .255 BA, .344 OBP
Colton Cowser (26): 291 G, .214 BA, .297 OBP
Jordan Westburg (27): 260 G, .265 BA, .312 OBP
Jackson Holliday (22): 209 G, .229 BA, .300 OBP
Coby Mayo (24): 120 G, .193 BA, .281 OBP
Heston Kjerstad (27): 106 G, .218 BA, .284 OBP
Dylan Beavers (24): 53 G, .222 BA, .348 OBP
Sam Basallo (21): 48 G, .166 BA, .246 OBP

Basallo is only 21, Holliday is 22, and Beavers is 24. They deserve more time. But the remainder of this crop are no longer especially young, and too much of their production has been mediocre or worse. At the major league level, a sub-.200 batting average is not really acceptable, nor is an on-base percentage south of .300. Even figures only modestly above that are not what one expects from the core of a supposed contender.

Rutschman remains a solid catcher, and Henderson is talented enough that one assumes he will rebound. Pete Alonso, the Orioles' big veteran signing, has also struggled early, but he has a long track record and is far less concerning. The real issue is the larger developmental picture. Too many of Baltimore's highly touted hitters have either plateaued or failed to establish themselves.

That is why the Mike Elias project is starting to look like a failure. He was hired to build a pipeline, an identity, and a franchise that could contend year after year. That was the promise of Astroball.

If 2026 winds up looking anything like 2025, the Orioles will have to question whether Astroball is a fit in Baltimore.

Mark James is the Kirkus-starred author of Iran War geopolitical thrillers Friendship Games and The Compass Room. He has taught political and economic geography for over twenty years.