With the Orioles in last place in the American League East, general manager Mike Elias held a news conference to address what he called a “rough start” to the season.

Elias answered questions about manager Brandon Hyde, the starting rotation’s struggles and more during the 15-minute session. Here are five things we learned:

Elias took responsibility for the club’s awful April: About two weeks ago, Elias sat down with the media with a long list of injury updates to read off. Friday, while there were plenty of injured players to discuss, Elias had no such list. The main item on his agenda was to address his team’s 12-18 start to the season.

After quickly opening with an injury update, Elias turned his attention to the way the Orioles are playing.

“It’s been very difficult and we have not performed to expectations, so we all feel that. I feel that,” Elias said.

Elias listed the club’s long list of injuries, bad luck and underperformance from key players as the reasons. The Orioles have 13 players on their injured list, including stars Zach Eflin, Grayson Rodriguez, Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg. The offense’s underlying metrics — such as expected batting average and exit velocity — suggest Baltimore’s bats have been unlucky so far this season. And superstars like Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman spent much of April slumping, while the starting rotation entered Friday as the AL’s worst with a 6.04 ERA.

While Eflin, Rodriguez and several other starting pitchers are injured, Elias acknowledged the obvious: The rotation is the main reason the Orioles find themselves in the cellar after one month.

Elias signed three starting pitchers this offseason: Charlie Morton ($15 million), Tomoyuki Sugano ($13 million) and Kyle Gibson ($5.25 million). Sugano has been a massive success with a 3.00 ERA entering Friday — a fact that can’t be forgotten when assessing Elias’ offseason. However, the Morton deal has been nothing short of a disaster thus far, and Gibson allowed nine runs in his season debut Tuesday.

While Morton’s season isn’t over and the 41-year-old could certainly get back on track, he’s been such a factor in the team’s woes that he’s perhaps proving the baseball adage that “there’s no such thing as a bad one-year contract” to be false. Morton lost each of his first six outings, owns a 9.45 ERA and has been temporarily demoted to the bullpen.

“It is difficult to contend with that level of injuries,” Elias said about his rotation. “But even that aside, they’ve had a poor start and that’s my responsibility and I’m in charge of baseball operations and when we have a bad record to start the year, that’s my responsibility.”

Elias backs Hyde — but does so in a tepid way: Hyde was the No. 1 topic entering Elias’ news conference. That’s not surprising given the team’s ineffective and at times sloppy play through 30 games — the worst opening stretch to an Orioles season since 2019. Hyde’s job is to win ballgames, and his team has already lost six more than they’ve won.

Elias presumably had three paths to approach the topic of his skipper:

A full-throated defense

An obfuscation of the topic

Somewhere in between

Elias went with the third option — saying he’s “very confident” in Hyde but coming short of quelling the outside noise about the skipper.

After saying he was “very confident” in Hyde when first asked, the only reason he gave was that Hyde was “consistent” in the way he leads the team. That resulted in Elias being asked to list Hyde’s strengths as manager, and Elias, who often gives several-hundred word answers, kept this one short.

“He knows baseball really well,” Elias said. “He’s a good evaluator. He uses information at his disposal in a way that is intelligent, but also in a way that cares for his players. He’s a tough guy. This is wearing on both of us, but he’s handling it well.”

When asked if Hyde has lost the clubhouse — an idea that eight of his players rejected earlier this week — Elias again used the word “consistent” but didn’t give any explanation.

“Since this team started coming together in 2022, it’s been a very consistent place,” Elias said. “It still is that way to me and the people that are down there all the time — and [Hyde is] right in the middle of that.”

Elias could have said more than that. He chose not to.

He remains confident he can adapt to this new landscape: Fifteen years ago, Elias was a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals. Ten years ago, he was the Houston Astros’ scouting director. Five years ago, he was spearheading an Orioles rebuild that resulted in the club being the AL’s winningest team from 2023 to 2024.

As Elias has climbed the ladder, the sport has drastically changed. As a scout, he adjusted and honed his craft, building top-tier farm systems in Houston and then Baltimore. But he’s in uncharted waters now.

Elias now has a serious owner that appears willing to spend money — a stark contrast from how the team was operated by Elias under the Angelos family. Elias spent $73.5 million of David Rubenstein’s money this offseason, and the early returns on some of those contracts are tantamount to lighting those Benjamins on fire.

Is Elias second-guessing how he operated the offseason?

“I am constantly second guessing, analyzing, looking at things that I’ve done, that I didn’t do, the way that I did them, the processes, the outcomes,” Elias said. “I’m doing that all the time. It’s a big part of how I go about my career.”

Does he remain confident in the process he’s built here, and does it need any changes?

“I analyze stuff all the time,” Elias said. “I’ve been doing this for a while, in some different jobs, but the consistent thing is that I’m always adapting. Certainly, when you’re not getting the results you want, you try to see if there’s things you can do to adapt.”

Whether he can do so quickly enough to save the 2025 season or capitalize on the Orioles’ World Series window remains to be seen.

Elias’ faith in his young stars isn’t waning: The following Orioles players, all former top prospects who were drafted and developed under Elias, posted an OPS below .700 through April: Henderson, Rutschman, Westburg and Jackson Holliday. Elias isn’t losing faith in them.

“Where the results have landed thus far, I think it’s not to the level we wanted or expected. But I think that it will be going forward,” Elias said. “I think the talent in that room is enormous.”

An early storyline of the Orioles’ season — and something Hyde has provided as a reason for the offense’s woes when trailing in games — is that most of Baltimore’s young stars aren’t accustomed to experiencing failure and losing like this. Cedric Mullins, who called a team meeting for all position players on Monday after the Orioles were swept in Detroit, has expressed a similar viewpoint and his belief that the young players will figure it out.

Mullins was the one to step up in a role that might have been occupied by others in past years. Austin Hays was traded at last year’s trade deadline. Anthony Santander and James McCann weren’t re-signed this offseason. Is Elias confident that he built a roster with enough leaders on it?

“We’re organically having guys kind of step into leadership roles in this team,” he said. “I think the character of this team and the heads on the shoulders of the guys who are in there are positive traits for this team. But we’re seeing guys here in 2025 emerge as leaders of the team.”

Coby Mayo is ‘really close’ to rejoining Orioles: The Orioles can’t hit lefties. Mayo is mashing them in Triple-A.

The Orioles are the majors’ worst team against southpaws, sporting a .172 average, .492 OPS and a 2-8 record. Meanwhile, the right-handed-hitting Mayo is batting .520 with a whopping 2.050 OPS in a small sample of 19 plate appearances versus lefties.

Elias said the team’s performance against lefties is “very frustrating” because of how much of a focus it was this offseason to improve in that area. The four hitters Elias signed to major league contracts — Tyler O’Neill, Ramón Laureano, Gary Sánchez and Dylan Carlson — are all much better against lefties.

“I don’t think it’s permanent,” Elias said. “We had these issues last year, and we brought in some players that, scouting-wise, we believed in against left-handed pitching. … Their track records against left-handed pitching were really, really strong, and it’s a pretty small sample out of the gates for those guys.”

Calling Mayo up seems like an easy way to bolster the lineup versus southpaws, but it’s never that simple. Elias said Mayo is “really close” to earning a call-up but that the organization wants to do so in a way that sets the club’s No. 2 prospect up for success.

“He’s going to be a big part of this team,” Elias said.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer @baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.