Mike Elias was never going to do anything other than throw his support behind manager Brandon Hyde, as he did Friday when discussing the underperforming Orioles’ 12-18 record through April.

It was what the general manager said otherwise that not only explains why he’d feel compelled to back the manager to help oversee a turnaround but also why such a managerial change — should it come to that — would occur.

Elias took responsibility, as the man in charge of baseball operations, for what has occurred. He also said on several occasions that he believes things will improve, and he largely cited the talent levels and track records of the players as a reason for that. Same goes with some normalizing health and the potential for a stabilized starting rotation.

The common theme is that none of those have to do with the manager and all of them ultimately boil down to the bets Elias and his front office have made since the moment he arrived in Baltimore playing out the way they expected to.

Replacing the manager wouldn’t change any of that. But, outside of trades, it’s the only major card the Orioles can really play to turn things around should everything deteriorate.

When asked when the time might be right for a drastic change, be it from his approach with the team or Hyde’s on a field level, Elias’ answer was telling. “I think, if we didn’t have confidence in the talent level of some of the players that are underperforming, we’d address it at that time,” he said.

I can’t imagine a moment when that deterioration of confidence would come.

Everything the Orioles have done in the nearly seven years under Elias has been a direct result of their confidence in their plan and, by extension, themselves. To lose faith in Hyde would be losing faith in everything they’ve built together — unless the situation becomes so desperate that he feels he has no other choice.

Elias said he’s “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,” and I believe him. This is not an obstinate organization, but it is a convicted one.

The Orioles’ conviction is that this is going to work the way they’ve done it and continue to do it. If they don’t start winning and Elias has to go the route of replacing Hyde, it will be for the same reasons he’s backed Hyde and by extension this team to turn things around: because he believes in the talent on the roster and everything that went into putting it together.

“I think the talent in that room is enormous, and the health’s not in a great spot right now. I think that’s going to change.”

Orioles general manager Mike Elias

At his first winter meetings, Elias referred to himself and assistant general manager Sig Mejdal as arriving with “among the best track records” in the game when it comes to scouting and player development from their time with Houston and St. Louis. They selected and developed a dozen big league hitters (including Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Heston Kjerstad, Jordan Westburg and Colton Cowser) in their first three drafts in charge, and combining them with Jackson Holliday, the top pick in the 2022 draft, created a tremendous homegrown core.

In 2024, injuries undermined the team as a whole: pitching injuries in the first half and blows to the lineup in the second. A similar circumstance helped contribute to the club’s disappointing start, but at issue right now is the way Elias built around that homegrown core.

Free-agent starting pitcher Charlie Morton is now a reliever with a 9.45 ERA, and while Japanese free agent Tomoyuki Sugano appears to be a shrewd piece of business, the rotation’s underperformance has meant the Orioles are out of games too early too often.

And, given his conviction in the homegrown talent the Orioles have assembled, there wasn’t much opportunity to sell to free agents to upgrade the lineup this winter, but what Elias did was use his one everyday opportunity on a right-handed-hitting outfielder (the injured Tyler O’Neill) to help the club fare better against left-handed pitching. And he filled bench roles with similar profiles (Ramón Laureano and Gary Sánchez).

Through a month of the season, hitting left-handed pitching has been a significant weak spot for the team. Elias described it as “very frustrating because it’s been a major factor” in the Orioles’ overall struggles and reinforced the conviction behind the process of building the roster the way they did.

“We brought in some players that, scouting-wise, we believed in against left-handed pitching, but then their track records against left-handed pitching were really, really strong,” he said. “This is a pretty small sample out of the gates for those guys, so I’m optimistic and hopeful that they’re going to start producing like they normally do against left-handed pitching. But we did some things to address that that I don’t think were too unpredictable, and here we are. It’s been frustrating.”

There’s that confidence again, fueling the optimism that things will not persist like this. There’s a lot more evidence that things will normalize inside the team’s projection model, based on thousands upon thousands of historical data points that helped drive the decision to put the team together this way in the first place, than there is to abandon this course based on a bad month.

So, if you’re Elias, you back the manager because you back the team you put together. You back the manager because his success at this point is wholly intertwined with your own. It’s not bad enough yet that the painful uncoupling that removing Hyde would entail is necessary, though if things get worse in May that may be the one lever Elias has left to pull.

I left Friday pretty convinced he doesn’t think it will get to that point.

“Where the results have landed thus far, I think it’s not to the level that we wanted or expected, but I think that it will [be] going forward,” Elias said. “I think the talent in that room is enormous, and the health’s not in a great spot right now. I think that’s going to change.”