BALTIMORE — Regardless of your feelings on the Orioles’ handling of top prospect Jackson Holliday, there’s a good chance you’ve felt right and wrong at different points over the last five weeks.
From the perceived mismanaging of offseason expectations preceding him not making the Opening Day roster to Holliday being promoted to the majors after just 10 Triple-A games to open 2024 and being sent back to the minors after 10 games of dramatic struggles, the way general manager Mike Elias and the organization have handled the 20-year-old phenom has been weird to say the least. That’s not to suggest anyone’s doubting Holliday eventually reaching his full potential — remember how bad current AL Rookie of the Year favorite Colton Cowser looked last summer — or even making meaningful contributions later this season, but his first stint in the majors wasn’t working nor showing enough positive signs to delay the need to make tweaks at a lower level.
A 2-for-34 start to his major league career didn’t tell the whole story as Holliday had struck out 18 times and walked only twice in 36 plate appearances. In contrast, he registered the same number of strikeouts as walks (138) over 727 career plate appearances in the minors. On Friday, Elias took accountability for the current state of affairs, saying there’s no “crystal ball” or “playbook for how to handle somebody who was moving along as quickly and as well as he was” through the minors.
The Orioles executive has more than earned the benefit of the doubt after brilliant work rebuilding a lowly organization into a legitimate World Series contender, but it’s fair to question the lack of conviction pertaining to Holliday. Still, player development is rarely linear for even the greatest talents of all time.
“None of this is ideal,” Elias said. “I want to stress that I’m ultimately responsible for how these things go, but once the evaluation was made by my staff and me that it would be better if he was back in Triple-A kind of resetting and making some small adjustments hopefully, we didn’t see any benefit in waiting any longer other than doing it for the sake of it. That didn’t seem like a good reason to me, and so we want him to go play at the level that would be most beneficial for his development right now, and that’s Triple-A.”
Elias wouldn’t disclose the specifics of those adjustments, but it leads one to believe this isn’t as simple as Holliday going to Norfolk to regain his confidence and bat .350 for a couple weeks. Though making no promises with Baltimore among the best teams in baseball and not knowing what roster needs could arise, Elias hopes to “prioritize [Holliday’s] own development in the short term.”
The Orioles are also expecting to face another run of left-handed starters in the near future, which would have left the lefty-swinging Holliday on the bench more frequently anyway.
“I think the bright side of this is he got very intense, very specific feedback from major league pitching,” Elias said. “He’s a brilliant talent and very sharp kid. I expect he’s going to go implement those adjustments really quickly, but we felt steady playing time in Triple-A was the place for that for a number of different reasons, including his projected playing time for the next couple weeks [and] also the fact that we’ve got a team in a tight race in the American League East. It’s just not the optimal place to be doing player development for a kid like him.
“It’s nothing that Jackson did. We were the ones that have been moving him along this quickly. It was a little hiccup, and I think it’s probably the first one that he’s ever had and he’s ultimately going to be better off for it.”
This obviously wasn’t what anyone had in mind when Holliday made his debut at Fenway Park just over two weeks ago, but both Elias and manager Brandon Hyde complimented the natural shortstop’s defense at second base and maturity beyond his years.
And Elias insisted Holliday’s “growth mindset” will serve him well overcoming this adversity.
“Ultimately, do I like the way that this has gone in April totally? No, and I feel responsible for that,” Elias said. “But it’s possible — just like it was for Grayson [Rodriguez] or Colton Cowser or any of these guys — that this was sort of a necessary development episode to be exposed to this before you’re fully ready for it. Now, the work that you put in, you kind of know exactly what you need to do when you get back up there, and that’s valuable.
“It comes at a cost to get that negative feedback, but it’s valuable. I guarantee you Jackson’s going to channel that well.”
