BALTIMORE — Mike Elias could have leaned on context to dull the pain.

The postseason, with its tiny samples and outsized consequences, will always confound a baseball rationalist to some degree.

But the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager did not pretend everything was OK Thursday, less than 24 hours after his team lost a wild-card series to the Kansas City Royals in which it scored one run over two games.

“The expectations from this season were different,” Elias told reporters at his season-ending news conference. “We didn’t meet them. We all feel that. And it has applied a different kind of pressure that is new for a lot of people in this building. The big leagues can do that to you. I am optimistic, bullish. I believe in this group going forward. But it’s not just going to happen automatically. We’re going to have to put in the right work this winter.”

This was the tone Elias needed to strike to maintain full credibility with a fan base that watched the Orioles go from the best team in baseball over the first 2 1/2 months of the season to a .500 mediocrity over the last 2 1/2. He correctly noted that the crushing disappointment he shared with players and fans was about more than two games. The Orioles began falling short of their own lofty expectations long before the Royals arrived to finish them off. Bats that slugged loudly in the first half of the season went silent on too many nights in August, September and October.

“It’s two games, but we do this two years in a row, and in the context of a second half where the run creation just dissipated,” Elias said. “There were health reasons for that, but I’m not going to pretend that that was the entirety of it, especially with the way that the quick postseason went. I think there are growing pains, and it’s not just for the players, it’s organizationally. … The entirety of our baseball operation is experiencing growing pains, and it would be naive to not expect that to happen, but it would be a failure on my part if we’re not able to adjust.”

It was a markedly different message than he offered a year ago when the Orioles were processing a three-game sweep by the Texas Rangers that ended their delirious rush of a 101-win season.

They preach a credo of pitiless self-examination, even when they’re playing well.

“That said, if we’re evaluating players or things like that, I don’t want to get caught up in what they did in a three-game sample,” Elias said when he met with reporters on Oct. 12, 2023, two days after the Orioles “got our teeth kicked in” by the eventual World Series champion Rangers.

It was the answer we’d expect from an executive who learned his craft in the data-driven Houston Astros front office that took “Moneyball” to the next level. “My s--- doesn’t work in the playoffs,” Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane famously told author Michael Lewis, lamenting the degree to which luck rules short series.

It’s still true that the math of a six-month season largely goes out the window when we’re trying to guess which clubs will thrive in a given October.

But that knowledge provides Elias no comfort as he tries to understand what just happened to the Orioles, and he’s not asking fans to ignore the futility they watched with their own eyes.

Now, he must strike a tricky balance between identifying targets for productive change and hewing to the principles that lifted the Orioles from 110 losses in 2021 to playoff appearances the past two seasons.

Or, as he put it: “I need some time to examine striking the right balance between acknowledging the positives of what’s going on here with our apparent shortcomings.”

Elias made it clear that he will not tear up his foundation. Manager Brandon Hyde, who’s eating more than his share of criticism at the moment, will remain in place as one of the general manager’s chief collaborators. The promising hitters drafted and developed by Elias’ staff will “continue to be the backbone of the team.” The organization’s vaunted research and analytics arm will help guide its quest for self-improvement.

“One of the ways we have become one the better organizations, and I plan to stay one of the better organizations, is we’re hard on ourselves,” Elias said. “We will look at everything. We do that every winter, but it’s a little easier to do when you have this punch in the gut and this bad taste in your mouth. It puts everyone in a mode — we have the kind of people around here who want constructive criticism and want to continue to get better.”

As expected, he did not offer many specifics.

Will the hitting struggles lead to changes to the coaching staff? Elias and Hyde, who spoke after him, elided that issue.

Will the Orioles be less reliant on all-or-nothing power hitting in 2025? Elias shared fans’ frustration in watching the club strand runners but noted that performance with runners in scoring position is notoriously volatile from season to season (the Orioles, with many of the same players, excelled in this area in 2023).

“I am going to behave as though it is under our control, and we are going to examine everything about our offensive approach, teachings, the mix of personnel,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s necessarily all chance.”

Hyde made an interesting comment when the subject of offensive approach came up during his news conference. When he was on the Chicago Cubs staff, he watched veteran Ben Zobrist make an immense impact on an otherwise young lineup by working walks and driving the ball to all fields — in other words, the tools of experience.

Was this a not-so-subtle indication that the Orioles could use such a hitter to help them avoid strings of empty at-bats?

Elias acknowledged that he focused his big moves last offseason and at the trade deadline on pitching. His trades for Corbin Burnes and Zach Eflin paid off, but he left the offense a bat short because of his confidence in the club’s existing core.

“We’ll see what we end up doing, but certainly not immune to that thought,” he said when asked if a battle-tested hitter might be on his shopping list.

He expressed absolute belief that the Orioles’ new owners, led by David Rubenstein, will give him the financial backing he needs to reshape the club this winter. But as expected, he gave no assurances on possible efforts to re-sign Burnes or the team’s top home run hitter, Anthony Santander.

Thursday was more about acknowledging that the Orioles “got punched in the stomach again” and taking responsibility.

Elias did not hesitate when asked if he thinks this year’s failure demands a harder look in the mirror than last year’s abrupt and disappointing end.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “Everything went really smoothly last year, and then the playoffs didn’t. This year, I felt like the first few months of the season, we picked up where we left off, and then through a variety of factors, it just dissipated. … I want to do everything in my power to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

A verdict on Elias’ quest is at least a year away. But he took the necessary first step by saying, plainly, there is a problem.

©2024 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.