Elias on Mancini, draft preparations and more

Mike Elias is preparing as if the 2020 season will begin at some point over the summer. He's preparing as if the First-Year Player Draft will last 40 rounds. He's proceeding as if baseball life will get back to normal while fully aware that it might stay on hold.

There might not be a season. The draft might consist of only five rounds. The club's executive vice president and general manager couldn't offer many updates this afternoon in a Zoom video call with the local media. He's hoping for the best and braced for anything that comes along.

"I hope that everyone in our fan base and across Maryland and everyone who follows the team is hanging in there," Elias said while speaking from his home office.

"Obviously, there are a lot of answers that we're still waiting on at a societal level that will dictate what's going to happen in baseball. There's only so much that we can forecast at this point, but I can say and I can assure everybody that the organization on all fronts is working hard. Everyone's doing our respective jobs as best as we're able to do from a remote setup and we'll be here ready and baseball will be ready for America when America's ready for us."

Players who were expected to avoid surgery while hurt in camp have been able to do so, including reliever Evan Phillips, who is rehabbing a sore elbow and should be ready for the season if it unfolds. Outfielder DJ Stewart also is going to be ready after undergoing ankle surgery in October, the stoppage providing more recovery time.

Elias has stayed in contact with Trey Mancini, who's recovering from March 12 surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his colon. They spoke over the weekend and Elias checked in with him today.

"He's doing well," Elias said. "He had a major procedure and a major life event and the recovery is a long one and it's a serious one, but his health status personally, the way that the operation went and the demographics age-wise and health-wise that he resides in going into this puts him in a really good spot to make a 100 percent recovery both from a general health standpoint, but also a baseball sense. But it is going to take some time. He's going to be out for months rather than weeks.

"With us not knowing what or when this season will start and end, it's really hard for me to put his recovery timeline in the context of a baseball season right now, but it's going to be a months-long process rather than weeks-long, but we're totally confident in the outcome and his eventual comeback."

Elias isn't more or less optimistic about the season starting up. He awaits more news about the coronavirus pandemic, how it's impacting people around the world, and keeps baseball in its proper perspective.

"I think just like everybody here, it changes for me day to day," he said. "We read national news, you read an article with some viewpoints and you don't know what to think. I know that we're really trying to play and the players want to play and the league wants to play, but we're also - all of us - very mindful of what the priorities are right now and that's public health, and so that topic is going to need to be addressed in a satisfactory way before we can conceivably play. But that doesn't mean you can't plan and start to think.

"I like the fact that we're hearing ideas and the people in the league offices and across sports are working on scenarios for baseball to come back this year, because we really want to do it, we want to be part of returning to a feeling of normal life. We think that sports will mean a lot to people, especially during this period of time to have something to follow. Even though it's just sports and it's entertainment, it's a very important part of our greater society, really across the world. And so I think it will mean a lot when it comes back and we want baseball to be a big part of that. I'm really hopeful that we can figure out a way to do it and do it the right way."

One idea that's been floated in the industry is for teams to play their games at their spring training sites. Elias said he thinks the Ed Smith Stadium complex would be a suitable alternative.

"I think our first choice, all of us, will be to play with fans somewhere and up north versus down south," he said. "I think we'd all prefer to be at home. But this isn't a normal situation, so we're going to have to presumably take what we can get, and if something like that, that we've been reading about, if that's what comes first, I would think our spring training facility would be able to host Major League Baseball. We do it in March and February under normal circumstances. But that's all just speculation right now. I'm reading about this stuff in the media like you guys."

With no games to be played or roster moves to make, the Orioles are focused on preparing for the draft in whatever form it takes. Elias called it "our most immediate item."

"We've launched a big set of meetings this week with our scouting department and we had our first one today on that front, so we feel like we're in good shape there," he said. "But the bottom line is, as a new administration and as a team that we felt was playing catchup a little bit in the infrastructure department and the digital infrastructure department, we've been able to leverage some of this time a lot better than we would have otherwise."

There are the expected challenges, including the loss of spring seasons that were critical in evaluating talent at the high school and college levels.

"It's been really interesting," Elias said. "The NFL is preparing for the draft right now and I've talked to some front offices in the NFL and they're having to do it over Zoom and over conference calls on a much tighter timeframe. And they have the added element of being able to trade picks during the draft and so they have to make a lot of really big decisions and it's really different for them. But it's something we can pull off nowadays.

"There's really good technology platforms. We can share screens, we can look at video together, we can talk. It hasn't been too bad, and I feel like we're as well set up for this as any scouting department because we've got a staff that prioritizes putting work in over the summer - showcase circuit, the Cape Code League, working into the fall, getting our ducks in the row in the fall and wintertime. And then we also have a dedicated team of analysts in the front office that work on the draft, and those guys do it from video and data even without this situation. So we kind of have the infrastructure in place to do things that way, to evaluate players that way, and obviously now we're having to rely on that a little bit more than we'd like to because we're not getting live games, so it's interesting, but we definitely think we're going to be able to pull it off and it's not like we're in foreign waters in terms of evaluating players this way.

"In terms of certain guys in the draft, ... it's going to be tougher for colder weather players to get noticed this spring if they didn't make an impression this summer or fall. With a shorter draft conceivably, there might be fewer high school players that sign, but when you look at the statistics of the draft, it's almost like 90 percent of the high school players that sign end up going in the top five rounds anyway, so if we only have a five-round draft, maybe it won't look so much different. But it's hard to think this will be exactly the same as other draft patterns."

Other tasks are handled now that normally might have to wait or couldn't be done at the current pace.

"We're trying to look on the bright side of being able to take advantage of some of this time without games to hit the speed-up button on some big-picture projects that we had anticipated taking longer or are usually confined to the offseason," Elias said, "because during the season we kind of have this day-to-day flow of issues that land on your desk. And amongst those are building our internal scouting and information and analytics database, which we have really ramped up and is basically up to industry standards at this point already, we believe.

"But also, we're putting together a player development manual online with video, with the coaching literature. Pulling all of our information from our video platforms into our scouting database. There's a lot to keep us busy right now."