The hiring of Mike Elias to be the next Orioles general manager is something that should offer hope to everyone that, a few years down the road, the O’s can be good again. There is a lot of baseball to be played between now and then, including next year.
Some of that baseball could still be bad. The reality is that there’s probably nothing Elias can do this offseason, or would even necessarily want to do, to make the Orioles a 90+ win team in 2019. No combination of free agent signings or trades are going to make the Orioles contenders for the World Series next year.