Orioles introduce new general manager Mike Elias: live blog

The Orioles have officially stepped into a new and hopefully brighter era with the hire of Mike Elias to be the next executive vice president and general manager. After announcing the hire on Friday, the team is introducing Elias to the media in a conference at 11am today where he will presumably offer a statement and then take questions. Sons of Peter Angelos, John and Louis, will also be present.

As a rare bit of big offseason news in Birdland, this conference will be carried on both MASN and on 105.7 FM in Baltimore. For those of you who aren’t in Baltimore, or who are stuck at work, the Orioles say that the press conference will also be carried live across a number of Internet platforms, including the team’s Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages, as well as on Orioles.com.

I don’t expect Elias to give much in the way of details about anything, because it’s just an introductory conference and he’s only had a few days to take stock of everything anyway. If we’re lucky we might get to hear him lay out the broad outline of a plan that sounds like it might result in some fun Orioles baseball being played again in another 4-5 years.

In the comments, I’ll be doing my best to transcribe the interesting parts of this conference.

For now, enjoy the exciting highlights of Elias’s career as a baseball executive, provided by the team in the press release announcing the hire:

Elias just completed his 12^th season in Major League Baseball, most recently serving as Assistant General Manager, Player Acquisition with the Houston Astros. Throughout his seven years in Houston, he helped to shape an Astros roster that produced back-to-back 100 win seasons, a World Series Championship, two American League Championship Series appearances, and two division titles. He was also an integral part of building one of baseball’s top-ranked farm systems that routinely served to graduate talent to the Major League club.

Elias joined the Astros in 2012 as a special assistant to the General Manager and was a key contributor to Houston’s top-ranked First-Year Player Draft by Baseball America. That year, he was named the club’s Director of Amateur Scouting, a role in which he served as one of the organization’s top talent evaluators. In 2016, he was promoted to Assistant General Manager, Scouting and Player Development, overseeing multiple facets of baseball operations, including player development, minor league operations, and the draft. Additionally, he has led domestic and international scouting efforts for the club since 2017.

Prior to joining the Astros, Elias spent five seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, the last two years as the club’s Manager of Amateur Scouting. During his time with the Cardinals, he signed and scouted many Major League players and contributed to the development of the scouting department and draft process. His professional career began as an amateur scout for the Cardinals in 2007.

Here’s Elias himself with a brief message before the conference:

It may be that this whole endeavor will not work out at all. Even if it does work out, there are probably at least two more years of very bad baseball left to endure before we start seeing the good stuff. Down the road, once they start playing games, that might not be so much fun. Today is full of enough potential to make it fun, so hopefully you can enjoy the start of this new era in Baltimore.