Whatever additional changes are coming to the Orioles’ front office, and they already parted with player development executive Matt Blood and altered assistant general manager Sig Mejdal’s title and responsibilities, they aren’t ditching their reliance on analytics. That circle of trust remains unbroken.

The data isn’t the sole fuel used to drive the organization, but it still revs the engine.

Questions about the Orioles’ commitment were raised after they hired Mike Shildt as upper-level minor league coordinator of instruction in November 2025 and with the increased visibility of Cal Ripken Jr., who’s part of the ownership group and offering his input on instruction, fundamentals and anything else that a Hall of Famer brings to the table.

How nice that the Orioles gave him a seat at it after so many years of exclusion.

These are baseball people whose lessons are more apt to come from the old school.

Every aspect of the organization is under scrutiny after a second straight losing record. President of baseball operations Mike Elias said it multiple times this year, it isn’t just the personnel. It’s also the philosophies.

Elias was asked at the season-ending press conference about marrying analytics with the more traditional eye test.

“Yeah, look, I could talk for a while on this. I won’t, but look at the teams that are doing really well right now and the way that they’re caricaturized, too. It’s clearly an enormous part of success in this sport nowadays,” Elias said.

“It can, I think, get unfairly attacked when a team is not being successful because it, by nature, presents counterintuitive information. That’s the whole point of it, and I totally understand and appreciate all that. And my roots as a person in baseball over 20 years in Major League Baseball is as being a subjective evaluator that does not provide analytical information, but marries it with stuff that’s more traditional and more intuitive. So I kind of have, I think, a full appreciation of that spectrum.

“We haven’t done well executing on that front, or well enough on that front by appearances of the results. So we are looking at the particular inputs, the blends, the balances, the fine points of execution, but there’s no team in baseball or a lot of other sports that are just going to completely run away from using advanced analytical information.” 

So they’re going to keep eating from that trough but also seek subsistence from other sources.

Elias is in steady contact with ownership, led by David Rubenstein. Meetings are part of the routine after another premature end to the season.

“Very robust group, as a lot are nowadays, or a lot of the newer groups are increasingly, there’s a lot of people involved,” Elias said. “David’s in charge. Michael Arougheti is extremely high in the ownership group and knows what he’s doing and is very involved, as well. And then we have other people to varying degrees of involvement. But it’s an excellent group.

“They’re around a lot, they’re very supporting, they’re very communicative. It’s a very deep ownership group. It’s thrilling to have. It’s been super frustrating that, we did pretty well in ’22, ’23 and ’24, and now we’ve got this new group in and we haven’t been able to deliver the results. The communication is continuing on a fairly daily basis over the next few weeks and we’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about.”

*Trevor Rogers probably won’t need to use his win total in 2026 to bump up his value in free agency, assuming that he turns down the qualifying offer, but he’s part of an interesting trend with the Orioles.

They don’t have a repeat leader in victories this decade.

Rogers is first this season with 10, one more than Chris Bassitt and Brandon Young. Dean Kremer ranked first in 2025 with 11, one more than Tomoyuki Sugano and two more than Rogers.

Corbin Burnes won 15 games in 2024, Kyle Gibson won 15 in 2023, Jordan Lyles won 12 in 2022, John Means and Matt Harvey won six in 2021, and Thomas Eshelman and Travis Lakins Sr. won three in the truncated 2020 season.

The Orioles, Mets and Padres are the only major league teams that don’t have a repeat leader this decade, per STATS.

*How do you improve your record in one-run games?

Win them? No kidding. The task is turning around a trend that hurt this club.

The Orioles went 18-24 in one-run games this year for a .429 winning percentage that ranked 25th in the majors.

Before the rainout on Sept. 27, the Orioles had played in 108 games decided by three runs or fewer to tie the Guardians for most in the majors. They were 53-55 for a .491 winning percentage that ranked 18th. Cleveland had one more in the tank, losing 3-2 in Kansas City to finish 59-50 in those situations.

The 108 games for the Orioles were the most since 2013, when they played 111 and went 59-52.