If Adley Rutschman is as wise and humble as his grandfather (“When are we going crabbing?” the old man asked his 21-year-old grandson after the Orioles drafted him with the coveted No. 1 overall draft pick on Monday night), we’re in for some good times for the next decade or so. If all goes according to plan.

On first impression, speaking as the main attraction at a press conference in a land far, far away in Corvallis, Oregon, where Rutschman made a name for himself playing at Oregon State University, the kid sure sounds mature beyond his time spent living, and three years attending college.

That’s good news when his fresh, rosy-cheeked face is the new image of the Orioles rebuild.

“I always pride myself on how I carry myself every day, the things that I can control,” he said. “My grandfather likes to say, ‘Control the controllables.’” We’ve heard a sports psychologist or two say the same exact thing as grandpa, who is Ad Rutschman, 86, a legendary football coach back home in Oregon.

“That’s exactly what you need to do as a baseball player,” said Rutschman (pronounced Rutch-man). “There’s so many things that are out of our control. For me, I play hard every day. I’m going to give my best effort. Maybe I’m not doing it offensively one day, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t help the team win defensively. That’s how I view it.”

Get to know the name, and the person, O’s fans. Yes, help is on the way. “It’s a true honor to be selected No. 1 overall,” he said. “It’s one of those things you dream about.”

Even with skipping his senior year of college (he’s been drafted as a junior), Rutschman might not take the field at Camden Yards for a couple years. That’s the expectation even for a guy who has a ton of baseball potential, a 6-foot-2, 215-pound switch-hitting catcher who is a front-runner to be named college baseball’s top player after hitting .411 this season. He’ll start somewhere in the Orioles minor league system.

But, who knows? With how practically everyone is talking about him, he might arrive at the major leagues sooner. In addition to the seemingly uncanny composure, he sure has the skills and the pedigree. His father, Randy, was a college catcher and is now is considered one of the foremost youth teachers of the position in the Pacific Northwest. Rutschman feels like a baseball purebred.

“The perfect prospect,” former MLB general manager Steve Phillips said of him this week, one of the highest compliments of many good things said. Baseball America, the leading scouting publication of the sport, has called him the best prospect since Bryce Harper.

Rutschman is the type—chosen with the 1-1, as baseball insiders like to say, first pick of the first round of a draft in which more than 1,000 other players were selected this week—who could one day be a household name around these parts, much like Manny Machado or Adam Jones. Depending on who you ask, he could develop into a better player than either of them.

He’s proven his wares in college and improved over time, helped by a summer stint in the Cape Cod league (Think Freddie Prinze Jr. in Summer Catch) after a freshman year in which he hit .234. The next season, in 2018, Rutschman batted .408 and helped the Beavers to a College World Series title, as the series’ most outstanding player with 17 hits. They called him “Clutchman.” Then he starred for Team USA last summer, where he hit with a pro-style wood bat, compared to the metal ones they use in college.

To give you an idea of his athleticism, he was even a kicker on the Oregon State football team as a freshman, and set the Oregon state record with a 63-yard field goal in a high school game. Can we schedule a friendly competition with Justin Tucker right now, please? Rutschman may end up playing some first base for the Orioles, too. The only knock on him is his speed.

Just last week, while he played again in the NCAA tournament, the opposing team, leading by three runs, decided to walk him with the bases loaded and allow a score, instead of taking the risk of Rutschman belting a hit or home run and scoring more. That’s an absolutely unheard of thing to see your opponent do, an ultimate sign of respect. “It is pretty surreal,” he said.

And, aside from his skills on the field, he seems like someone who would be great to take home to mom and dad. His Instagram page appears to show a well-rounded, respectable guy doing regular things, like quoting lines from Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation. In a nice coincidence, he won’t even need to get familiar with new colors, as Oregon State wore orange and black.

“Adley is a future fixture for this organization,” new Orioles general manager Mike Elias said. “The amount of work that’s goes into what he’s done and becoming the number-one pick is not something that’s ordinary. I met Adley this winter and was immediately struck by him and impressed by his maturity and leadership. We’re very excited about what this is going to do for our future.”

Rutschman is the first pick made by Elias, who likely will have another No. 1 overall pick to work with next season, based on the way this year’s going. The ability to pick the best prospects from across the baseball landscape is a key part of the Birds’ plan, and what made this leadership regime successful in previous stops like Houston, which won a World Series, and St. Louis, which did too. This is the business of winning, after all.

Which brings us back to grandpa, who had a bit of advice for the kid who may sound mature beyond his time, but who still can’t hold a stick to 66 more years of experience. “The first thing you do is bury the first million bucks in the backyard,” was the message for when he signs a lucrative contract.

Before all that, though, Rutschman has got finals at Oregon State to finish next week. “I’ve still got some school to do,” he said. “That’s going to be rough.” Then we’ll be happy to give him a warm welcome to Baltimore.

The first impression of this Orioles season was the stunned silence from the crowd at Yankee Stadium during player introductions of our dear visiting team. So many new names, they didn’t know who anyone was. Or maybe it was simply apathy. Only Chris Davis’ name and likeness elicited a few boos.

At the same time, first-year manager Brandon Hyde felt a little bit differently, as he stood on the third-base line and started to soak in the reality of the situation. It’s the start of, well, everything new compared to last year’s edition of the Orioles. Most of the players; there were seven new starters, and 11 of the 25 in uniform made their first Opening Day roster. All of the coaches. The general approach to baseball. The expectations. “When they say your name,” during introductions, Hyde said afterward, “that kind of hits you a little bit.”

It was an appropriate welcome to the Orioles’ 2019 baseball season, and came ahead of an expected result: A loss, 7-2, in New York to the talent-laden Yankees, one of this year’s World Series favorites, as usual.

The Baby Birds, meanwhile, at the start of an ambitious rebuild plan under the leadership of a new data-driven front office regime, are the longest of long shots to win the title (it sounds silly even to write that phrase, “win the title”). Odds are as big as 2,000-to-1 at last check of the Las Vegas sports books. A few free-wheeling, or desperate, souls have placed that wild bet.

Back here in reality, here’s three big takeaways from the O’s season-opener:

Say it with us, the theme for 2019! “We’re trying to elevate the talent level of the organization.”

The mantra for this season is not exactly something you’d print and put on the back of a t-shirt for a Little League team, much less a Major League one. But is it the truth. New Orioles general manager Mike Elias said the words once again, during a second-inning appearance in the MASN broadcast booth.

Translation: This year is not about winning. This season is about the next three or four seasons as much as it is 2019.

This can be a hard concept for a fan to accept the day after the first game of a six-month, 162-game schedule. But Elias and the O’s leadership have and will continue to preach patience in their long-term vision for sustained success, of building a strong minor league system, developing players, making a hard run at international scouting, and hitting on draft picks (hopefully high ones).

We still think Adam Jones was worth having around—he hit a home run yesterday, by the way, for Arizona—but “we don’t want to be a one-year wonder,” Elias says (and poof, images of the 2014 Orioles, and Nelson Cruz belting 40 home runs then leaving in free agency that offseason, come to mind). That’s a blueprint that’s worked in his previous stops in Houston and St. Louis, both teams that won World Series championships while he and numbers wizard, O’s assistant GM Sig Mejdal worked there.

Time will tell exactly how hard the games are to watch this season. Given the “talent level of the organization” relative to the rest of pro baseball right now, after the dismantling of last year’s core amid a historically bad year, there might be 100-plus losses again.

Thursday’s start, which included a 428-foot three-run homer in the bottom of the first inning by Luke Voit, one of the cartoonish mammoth Yankees (sunflower seeds, much?), off the bearded Andrew Cashner, was not a great sign. But as best you can manage, keep the long term in mind.

The Bright Spots

There were a few.

Trey Mancini, three years removed from being a rookie and now the grizzled veteran of this team, looked like it. In the lineup as designated hitter and batting fourth, he went 3-for-4, scored the Orioles first run and knocked in their second.

Third baseman Rio Ruiz, a 24-year-old, drove home Mancini for that first score in the top of the fourth inning and in the bottom half made a nice defensive play, stopping a line drive.

Shortstop Richie Martin, who last season played 118 games in the minors for the Oakland A’s affiliate in Midland, Texas, and was one of two O’s making his major league debut, helped turn a double play. Reliever David Hess was effective.

The highlight of the day was probably Joey Rickard’s diving catch in right field. Overall, the O’s defense looked pretty good.

Chris Davis, um . . .

He picked up where he left off. The strikeouts continue. Three of them. Already.

Davis batted seventh in the O’s order, a move Hyde made for a reason, and was pinch hit for in the ninth inning. “I’m going to try to do everything I can to take pressure off him,” the manager said of the guy with $92 million and four years left on his contract, coming off one of the all-time worst hitting seasons in baseball history. (Right. No pressure.)

Davis’ story is fascinating. One day we’ll really find out how Crush’s stroke and confidence completely unraveled, but for now, he’s a representative part of what might be the real O’s theme for 2019: Hope.

Davis is our primary emotional connection on the current roster to recent glory days. (Remember, Jimmy’s Seafood offered Davis, his children, and grandchildren free crab cakes for life for a reason.) We hope he can find some kind of respectable form to stave off the internet memes and comments that began instantly upon his first strikeout yesterday.

And, for the next six months, we hope the O’s do the best they can, give us some fun and enough reasons to watch, while we believe in the promise of a better future.

Opening Day is 20 days away, and—has anyone noticed?—Adam Jones is still a free agent. Yes, the beloved former pie-throwing, gum-chewing, sweet-swinging Orioles captain remains without a baseball home—and his actual home, the Lutherville estate he bought from Cal Ripken, Jr. about a year ago and renovated over the last several months, is on the market for $4 million, too.

It’s a long shot, but now more than ever the idea is worth discussing. Is a Jones-Orioles reunion at all possible?

A piece of required O’s fan reading might inform the chances. One of the more fascinating parts of Ben Reiter’s book Astroball, which chronicles how the O’s current front-office leadership regime of Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal helped turn the Houston Astros from rags (three straight 100-loss seasons) to riches (100 wins and a World Series title four years later in 2017), is the case of a veteran player and potential future Hall of Famer, Carlos Beltran. He’s a guy not unlike Jones in stature and reverence.

Beltran was older in baseball years, 39, when the Astros signed him to a one-year, $16-million deal ahead of the 2017 season. And though he didn’t get a hit in the World Series, he provided the organization’s younger players with invaluable guidance and expertise, and the team probably wouldn’t have a won a championship without him. The Puerto Rico native helped bridge the cultural gaps in the clubhouse between English and Spanish-speaking players. He shared tips he picked up while watching hitters’ video, not just of himself but of teammates and opposing pitchers. And, in general, he was a sounding board and a trusted source, for anything.

The circumstances of the current O’s are different. We’re not talking championship hopes this year; in fact, quite the opposite. The Astros were already on the upswing in their rebuild when they signed Beltran. The O’s are just starting theirs. But at the same time, Jones, at 33, is six years younger than Beltran was.

The salient point is about the valuable presence a respected and likeable veteran player can provide—even if it’s admittedly difficult to quantify in the data-driven, video-capture era the O’s are now practicing. Indeed, Reiter penned in Astroball about what Mejdal, the former NASA engineer turned baseball analytics guru, thought of the Astros signing Beltran: “Not only did Sig have zero predictive information related to chemistry, but he didn’t even know what he might try to predict it.”

Here’s a recent piece of evidence that might fit a predictive chemistry model, if applied to the question of if bringing back Jones is worth it. Like the rest of us, he watched as his former teammate, Manny Machado, signed a lucrative contract—with Jones’ hometown San Diego Padres, of all teams—then not long after in an interview delivered a few words that could be interpreted as bad-mouthing the O’s. “The Orioles drafted me. I did a lot for that community, I did a lot for the state, and they didn’t show me a little bit of love,” Machado said. “It is what it is.”

We really can’t imagine Jones saying anything resembling those comments, or starting a debate as to what he really thinks about Baltimore. We know what he thinks. His wife, Audie, is from here. He played 11 years here and didn’t want to leave (see, vetoing the Phillies trade last July). He was back to host a charity event a few weeks after the O’s 2018 season ended. And those actions represented just a few reasons why so many fans want to see @SimplyAJ10 back in an O’s uniform.

In late January at the Orioles’ annual FanFest, Elias, the new general manager, fielded more questions from fans about Jones than any other topic during public question-and-answer sessions. At times, like after the third, or the fourth, you could infer Elias would rather talk about something else. He didn’t rule out a possible reunion with Jones, but didn’t exactly sound like he was dying to make it happen either.

He said the O’s would monitor the free-agent market, that Jones was always welcome with the organization, and it was nice to hear great things about him. But he also mentioned giving young players time to grow and get major league experience, a more than reasonable argument. And, since then, spring training in Sarasota has revealed that Cedric Mullins, D.J. Stewart, and Austin Hays are in good position to start in the outfield this year and prospect Yusniel Díaz, the prize return in the Machado trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers last year, is on the radar, too. They’ve been team-building in Florida.

But there’s room in the clubhouse and on the field for a guy as appreciated as Jones. First off, he can still play. Maybe he wouldn’t play every day, but when he does, he would show how it’s done. And, heck, Trey Mancini did his best impression of the old captain at the start of spring training when he ordered platters of Popeyes chicken for all after the team’s first game. Could you imagine what it would be like if Jones was actually on the team?

If the losses pile up fast this season, which is possible, per the Vegas odds-makers, Jones’ presence alone would give us something to root for, and a reason to show up for a steamy game in the middle of the summer. Because the good memories still linger and sports heroes like him don’t come around all the time.

And, most relevant and practical, the free-agent market that Elias spoke of six weeks ago has broken in the O’s favor. Jones’ former teammate, Steve Pearce, the reigning World Series MVP, recently said he’s surprised Jones is still available. There’s three weeks left until the O’s open the season March 28 at Yankee Stadium before a nationally televised audience, and Jones wants to be on a roster by then.

It’s hard to know exactly what AJ’s asking price is, but if it’s not much more than the $4 million he’s asking for his own house, the O’s front office should again run the algorithms in their “Nerd Cave” (that’s a label the Astros analytics department was known by) and consider taking a hard look at bringing back the sentimental favorite this year.

Because who cares if Jones already had his emotional sendoff last September at Camden Yards? We could do that again. There’s time and space for this second act.

For all the many mentions and questions about analytics, player development, and the Orioles’ new data-driven era on Saturday afternoon at the Baltimore Convention Center, there was one moment that stuck out. And it was when recently hired Orioles assistant general manager Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer turned baseball front-office pioneer, took to the stage in front of hundreds of fans as part of a question-and-answer session titled, “Using Analytics Across Baseball Ops.”

For 35 minutes at the team’s annual preseason FanFest, the 53-year-old Mejdal (pronounced my-dell) sat on a brown wooden stool, the same one from which his boss and longtime co-worker, the O’s GM Mike Elias had earlier described the broad, long-term vision for the organization’s rebuild. Now Mejdal was in the spotlight, wearing a gray suit with a bright orange tie and black shoes, and he articulated details of what the presence of this new Ivy League and computer science-trained leadership regime means here and now—how blending numbers-based facts and analysis with the human nature of America’s pastime can work.

And Mejdal described the approach as only a true believer in the scientific method and the power of technology could do. He’s a guy who worked as a blackjack dealer in college, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical and mechanical engineering, and earned two master’s degrees—one in mathematical modeling and another in human-factors engineering (whatever that is). As he spoke, the day felt more like a Big Data business conference than a celebration and promotion of spring training kicking off in a few weeks.

“A lot of things that were just below the human’s ability to sense have now been revealed,” Mejdal said, as he detailed how it’s possible to use high-resolution video and radar to record things like velocity, location, and spin rate of a baseball thrown by a pitcher. “What you see as an exceptional slider, or a wonderful fastball, can be quantified. Instead of saying, ‘He just has good stuff,’ we’re able to describe the stuff to three decimal points and begin to see the specific idiosyncratic behaviors of the different hitters, and how they succeed or struggle against pitches that aren’t just called ‘a slider,’ but instead a pitch of 83 miles per hour with 18 inches of horizontal movement, and 1.5 inches of depth.”

Got all that? Mejdal said it without a pause. He’s been doing this sort of quantitative analysis, and finding data-driven ways to give teams an edge, almost as long as anybody in professional baseball, save for the early 2000s staff of the Oakland Athletics, who were featured in the book and movie Moneyball. That tale inspired Mejdal to consider his current career path and ultimately quit his job engineering for astronauts.

As was written in the 2005 book Fantasyland by Sam Walker, in which Mejdal was featured, he once worked in a windowless office on an U.S. Air Force base in California called the Blue Cube, a communications nerve center from which all satellite transmissions are routed and a security clearance is needed for entry.

That was 15 years ago, long before the numbers guys became fashionable hires in baseball, if not no-brainers to small-market owners like John and Louis Angelos looking to build sustainable winners. At the time, Mejdal, who grew up in San Jose the son of a career Army officer, and his wife, a nurse from Colombia, worked a hotel lobby in New Orleans during MLB’s winter meetings. He handed out packets of information to general managers about why teams should hire him. On the laptop in his backpack, he carried with him data of every player who wore a uniform since the Korean War, and promised he could provide previously unrealized truths with his analysis and ideas. He didn’t mention he hadn’t played baseball since Little League.

Mejdal landed with the St. Louis Cardinals 18 months later, a hire that not only gave him a dream job but also his first professional baseball lesson: “Even if it doesn’t seem broke, you fix it.”

“The owner of the Cardinals, at a time when they were winning 100 games, at a time when they weren’t persons like myself in baseball, brought in Jeff Luhnow [as general manager],” an MBA from Northwestern who hadn’t played baseball since high school. He hired Mejdal, and Elias, a former Yale pitcher, as a 24-year-old scout. Along with implementing an international scouting operation (just like the O’s are currently trying to do), they were key in developing several players on a team that won 2011 World Series.

“From day one of our incoming draft classes, they were taught and shown how we’re going to fix them,” Mejdal said. “Human factors are involved, there’s a sensitivity to it, but the underlying goal is to fix everything we can, because we have a good idea the opposition is trying to do that too.”

In seven years in St. Louis, Mejdal was credited with developing an analytics model that helped the team draft more future major leaguers than any other organization during that span. In 2012, he followed Luhnow to the Houston Astros, where Mejdal became the inventively named Director of Decision Sciences. There, as the right-hand man to Elias, Mejdal was instrumental in the development on the Astros farm system and turnaround from three straight seasons of at least 106 losses to a World Series championship in 2017.

Next stop on the success train? Hopefully Baltimore, where Elias took over leadership of O’s personnel two months ago, and brought the guts, ideas, and ethos of those previous stat-driven revolutions with him.

“Over the years, as we add some things to our draft and scouting process, as we bring in a lot of the analytics that Sig and I have really developed together for the draft, across two different organizations, the depth in our system will benefit greatly,” Elias said Saturday. “You’ll see the product of that the next couple years.”

That’s right, this may take a while. Elias and new manager Brandon Hyde are preaching patience. But in the immediate was Saturday’s stage scene, where Mejdal, sitting next to recently hired director of international scouting Koby Perez, fielded questions from the most dedicated fans on a variety of topics. And they gave insightful, honest answers and lessons that could be applied to a business or classroom as much as they will be to the Orioles clubhouse.

A few current and past players, like pitcher Paul Fry and Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, were even listening on Mejdal. He spoke about everything from how to start learning about analytics (go to baseball-reference.com—that’s what we use, too) to advice for college students interested in the field (you can’t go wrong with a computer science education), to the nuances of gathering, analyzing, and sharing usable statistical information to players and coaches.

On how the O’s analytics department is developing, Mejdal said:
“When we came here seven weeks ago, the analytics department consisted of zero analysts. I don’t know what the ideal number is but I’m pretty confident it’s not zero.”

On whose responsibility it is that players or coaches use the information provided to them:
“It’s the analyst’s responsibility to ensure that whoever the customer is—whether it’s the coach, the scouting director, the GM, the director of international, or a player—that they understand what the insight is and that you’ve done all you can to present it and to them. You’re asking them to change and that doesn’t just come with a printout from the computer saying, ‘Here, go change.’”

On what information analysts can provide to a player:
“We can provide a general behavior. ‘This is generally where you struggle. This is generally where the pitcher is going to throw at this point.’ It’s a model. It falls short of what’s going to happen in real life. But it’s still going to be useful.”

On how to keep the Orioles ahead of the analytics curve:
“We’re going to fill our department with the most skilled and innovative analysts and developers we can find, and we’re going to create a culture where a big chunk of their time is directed at, ‘What is the next big thing?’ Is it going to be computer vision, some artificial intelligence, something less sexy than that? We’re going to do our best to position ourselves to be better than any other club out there.”

On if the Orioles will have a better season than last year’s franchise-worst 47-115 record:
“I’m not going to make that prediction sitting up here in front of all of you, but what I can tell you is there in an amazing amount of young talent not just at the major league level, but throughout the system, and the future of the Orioles is right in front of you.”

It’s a new era, indeed. Could you imagine former manager Buck Showalter or GM Dan Duquette discussing artificial intelligence? At FanFest over the last several years, all they did was talk about playoffs. But for all the seemingly programmatic talk about customers, models, and data sets from the new leadership, there’s also a very interesting, human part of Mejdal’s story that blends the traditional and new-age ways of approaching team-building.

Two summers ago, Mejdal spent the season as an assistant coach for one of the Astros’ minor league teams, the Tri-City ValleyCats of the New York-Penn League, based in Troy, New York. The idea was to interact with minor league players in the flesh, to see what they really needed, and how best to turn office concepts into baseball field realities. It was similar what Mejdal did in his previous life in engineering.

“We could go to lunch and come up with wonderful ideas about how to help the minor leagues, but we’re ignorant to a large degree of really what it’s like,” he said. “There’s no better way to see what it’s like than be in a bus and bad hotels for 82 days.”

And so he did, road-tripping to games against teams like the Vermont Lake Monsters, Lowell Spinners, and Aberdeen IronBirds. He learned things about the game he hadn’t realized before, like how little one-on-one time players and coaches experience during the season. Then last year he roved among other minor league teams, doing the same. The New York Times chronicled the story, and accompanying photos showed Mejdal—wearing jersey No. 21, in honor of his college blackjack dealer career—in the dugout and on the field, where he coached first base.

“It was bizarre, but it was wonderful,” Mejdal said, “and a great learning experience.”

That’s a statement that carries extra weight when spoken by a former rocket scientist. If Mejdal can still learn, so can we.

The 45-year-old father of three who was introduced as the new manager of the Orioles on Monday afternoon didn’t deliver very many snappy quotes or tell long, winding perspective-laden stories like his predecessor did from the same table in Camden Yards’ auxiliary clubhouse the last eight years.

But Brandon Hyde isn’t going to be Buck Showalter, or anyone else for that matter. “I’m going to be me,” he said during a 35-minute debut press conference. Which begs the question, upon his arrival in Baltimore: Who exactly is he?

For starters, no offense, Hyde is a dirtbag. More specifically a Long Beach State Dirtbag, a 1997 alum of the California college and baseball program. From there, the mascots and names he wore on his uniform didn’t get much more glamorous. After a five-year minor league playing career as a catcher, Hyde began his coaching career by managing the Greensboro Grasshoppers, Carolina Mudcats and Jupiter Hammerheads of the Florida Marlins organization from 2005 to 2008.

At 10 years older than his new boss, the O’s new data-driven general manager Mike Elias, Hyde is already a baseball lifer, a journeyman type that toiled in the minors—“I was an average to below average minor league player who had to work for everything that he got,” he said. Then as a coach, before breaking into the big leagues as a bench coach, essentially a team’s No. 2 in command, in 2010 and holding that job for two different teams, most recently for the Chicago Cubs alongside Joe Maddon, one of the most respected managers in the game.

“He’s somebody who’s viewed as an up-and-coming star in our business,” Elias said of Hyde. “His was the very first name I heard. Every phone call I made, his name always came up.”

Shortly after Elias handed Hyde a fresh Orioles hat and a white No. 18 jersey to slip over his white collared shirt and orange tie to make things official, he became emotional as he sat down to read out loud from a sheet of prepared notes. “This is overwhelming,” he said, before hitting all the right points.

He talked about his strengths developing players and relationship building, skills that will be much needed as the O’s embark on a comprehensive overhaul from the front office to the lowest rungs of the minor leagues after a team-worst 115-loss season.

Hyde recognized Orioles Hall of Fame third baseman and current team ambassador Brooks Robinson sitting in the front row of the audience, and showed reverence for the team’s history and tradition. “Brooks Robinson’s sitting here,” Hyde said. “I’m in my new office, and there’s pictures of Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken, Sr. To be around history, and be involved in a city like Baltimore, is a dream come true. . . . I understand the significance of this position.”

And he and Elias, who’ve just gotten to know each other through the interview process, each talked about how they planned to work together. Elias and his right-hand man, former NASA engineer Sig Mejdal, and staff will supply “advanced information,” in the form of statistics, analytics, and scouting reports to Hyde, who, along with his yet-to-be-named assistant coaching staff (the work begins on that this week), will make sense of it and relay it to players.

“The buzzword,” Hyde said, “is collaboration. Open thinking and free conversation, creative ideas. That’s our goal here.”

The new manager, the 20th in Orioles history, also teared up when he thanked his parents, sister, wife, two daughters, and son Colton, who was somewhat of a fixture in the Cubs clubhouse when they broke their franchise’s 108-year long championship drought in 2016 and won the World Series.

Before each game at Wrigley Field, a then eight-year-old Colton and his dad played catch in the outfield. The next summer the he could be seen in the outfield making diving catches during batting practice. And now you can watch him here on YouTube. Cubs players considered Hyde’s son a lucky charm.

Chances are you might see the kid doing the same in one of the outfield corners at Camden Yards, if he practices what his father preaches. “The bottom line is to be true to yourself every single day,” his dad said. And so, we’ll see what that looks like in action soon enough.

The Orioles hired 35-year-old Mike Elias as the team’s next general manager, and reportedly as the highest-paid first-year GM in Major League Baseball history. The Houston Chronicle, the newspaper that covers the city where Elias has worked for the last six years with major league baseball’s Astros, first let us know about the announcement, as did a few other reports citing Elias as the front-runner for the job.

Elias, who has been Houston’s assistant general manager and was key in that franchise’s rebuild, is the person who will replace Dan Duquette as the O’s top front office official—and be the one who will hire a manager, shape the future, and be tasked with shifting the philosophy of an organization that’s coming off an embarrassing 115-loss season.

With that, here’s an introduction to Mr. Elias:

He was nine months old the last time the Orioles were in a World Series and is somewhat of a local.
Elias will turn 36 in December, meaning he was less than a year old when the O’s last appeared in (and won) the World Series in 1983. If hired, Elias would be part of a trend of younger front office officials across baseball, particularly those with a background heavy in statistics and analytics.

He’s also from Northern Virginia. Elias attended the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a public magnet school in Alexandria, so he’s not a stranger to the Mid-Atlantic area. It’s also possible he was an O’s fan growing up, though he’s worked in other parts of his country for his adult life. He graduated in 2006 from Yale, where he was a pitcher on the baseball team, after which the St. Louis Cardinals hired him as a scout.

He’s all about the numbers.
Think Moneyball. Elias represents John and Louis Angelos’ desire to replicate what other small-market franchises around baseball have done, using international scouting, drafting, and talent cultivated within its own minor-league system, and a deep understanding of data and analytics to field teams that can compete for championships no matter the budget.

Sports is so often a copycat business, and the Astros were one of the many teams that have made this approach work, culminating with a World Series title two years ago, a few seasons after losing an average of 108 games from 2011 to 2013. (See, there is hope!) And Elias was there for the entire transition. No doubt that was a big talking point that landed him the job. He’s also credited with being the driving force behind Houston selecting shortstop and future American League rookie of the year Carlos Correa No. 1 overall in the 2012 draft.

His right-hand man is a former NASA engineer, who could join him in Baltimore.
This is where things start getting exciting. What do the O’s start to look like with new front office leadership? It’s likely that Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer and blackjack dealer who worked with Elias in previous stops, joins him in the front office. Mejdal recently left the Astros organization after six years as the team’s top analytics mind.

His career route is fascinating. While working a biomathematician at NASA, where he was studying sleep patterns of astronauts on the international space station, Mejdal became a fantasy baseball expert and eventually a key figure in the Cardinals and Astros organizations.

In 2012, Houston hired him as “Director of Decision Sciences,” and he’s been at the cutting-edge of analytics throughout his career. Can’t we all use a Director of Decision Sciences?

Elias has no current ties to the O’s organization.
This, overall, is probably a good thing. But what does that mean for current employees in the organization like Brady Anderson, who is still in the front office? We shall see.

It’s within reason that Elias hires current Houston bench coach Joe Espada as manager to replace Buck Showalter. (Related: Buck’s home is now on the market for $1.5 million.) If that’s the case, we might be calling this team “the AstrOs.” Though we might anyway as it seems they’ll take on their rags-to-riches philosophy. So what? There are worse names to be called.

He’s got a lot of work ahead of him.
The Yankees and Red Sox are perennial powers in the division, and the Orioles are coming off their worst season, based on wins and losses, in franchise history. The O’s are the longest shot to win the 2019 World Series. This is also Elias’ first job as the big boss. There’s always a learning curve there. Bright side? He’s got the No. 1 overall pick to work with and a fanbase more than ready for a sustainable winner.