Coby Mayo made his MLB debut 11 months ago and it doesn’t feel like the Orioles have gotten as much out of Mayo as they could have in that time. Saying that I am disappointed by the first (calendar) year of Coby Mayo might sound a little harsh but my disappointment is not targeted at his play but rather at how his development has been handled in the last year.
The Orioles have been crafty with their service time manipulation so the fact that a calendar year has gone by since he was called up doesn’t matter much from a team control perspective so that’s exciting if you’re into wage suppression and things like that. However if the goal is setting a player up for success Mayo has been done a disservice by the Orioles.
Today I want to go back and look at the last 11 months to see where the Orioles have gone wrong with Coby Mayo so far.
When I say the last 11 months it makes it sound like I think that the Orioles were doing Mayo wrong from the moment they called him up and that is not true. I could quibble with timing and argue that he could have been called up sooner but that’s an iffy argument and any daylight I had to make it was slammed shut by Mayo being super overmatched in his first stint in the majors.
I have a small beef with how sporadic his playing time was once he got called up. In 2024 he appeared in just 17 games and got 4 plate appearances in just 5 of those 17 games. He got 2 or fewer plate appearances in 7 of those 17 games.
No Mayo did not play well in his limited opportunities in 2024 but I would argue that anyone would have trouble getting into a rhythm with that kind of usage over a 2 month span.
I’m not going to kill the Orioles for this because they were in a playoff race for the division and every game mattered down the stretch so it wasn’t the best time to let an offense first prospect go 0-4 everyday while playing shaky defense at third. You may also remember that Ramon Urias went on a scorcher last August so there were justifications for Mayo’s lack of playing time.
The real disservice comes in the offseason.
During the offseason front offices across the league assess their roster and plan for the future. They have to ask and answer questions about every player on their roster.
Should we re-sign x player? Should we move x pitcher to the bullpen? Should we move our centerfielder to the corner to make room for a free agent?
For the Orioles front office here are the questions they needed to answer in regards to Coby Mayo.
Is Coby Mayo an important part of our future?
If the answer is no then you trade him and that’s the end of the discussion.
If the answer is yes then you have to answer some more questions.
What position should Coby Mayo play for us?
Mayo has played third base most of his minor league career but he wouldn’t be the first bad defensive third base prospect to make the switch to first. He’s also young and athletic enough I don’t think the outfield would be out of the question if you gave him enough notice to start training as a right fielder. He’s fast and his best defensive tool is his cannon arm, sounds like a decent right fielder to me.
Once you’ve answered the position question you can get to work on the last question which is;
Who do we move to make room for Coby Mayo?
So to recap the three Coby Mayo questions the Orioles needed to answer in the offseason were
Is Coby Mayo an important or expendable part of the Orioles future?
What position should Coby Mayo play for the Orioles?
Who do we have to move to make room for Coby Mayo?
And as far as I can tell they didn’t answer a single one of these questions or if they did they chose to answer, maybe, I don’t know and we’ll see.
This kind of indecision is why the Orioles have failed to capitalize on the unique situation of having a roster full of above average position players as well as a farm system full of highly regarded prospects who’s positions are already filled at the Major League level.
A decisive front office would identify if they want to give the bulk of the playing time either to the established pro or the up and coming prospect and then trade the other to fill in other weaknesses on the roster. Like the rotation for example.
Obviously when you do this there is risk. If you trade the veteran and give the playing time to the young guy there is a risk that the young guy might totally flame out and be just awful. No matter how highly regarded a prospect is and no matter how gaudy their triple A stats are there is no guarantee that they’ll be a good major league player.
On the other hand if you trade the prospect in favor of keeping the veteran there is a chance that prospect might end up being a superstar and people will say for years “Can you believe they traded away a multi time all star for some pitcher?” and as a front office either scenario is pretty mortifying, one leaves your roster in a tough spot and the other ruins your reputation.
I get that these are hard decisions and it’s much easier said than done but that’s what the guys in the warehouse are paid to do. You can’t keep all your veterans and all your prospects you have to choose and the longer you delay the worse the returning trade package will be.
That’s the mistake the Orioles front office made. They didn’t make a choice.
I want to focus really quick on one of the choices they didn’t make, which was what position should Coby Mayo play. You might be tempted to think that they did decide that he should play third and that they just had to change their minds because of the Mountcastle injury but that’s not the order everything happened in.
All through Spring Training Mayo took almost all his reps at third. Then when he was sent to triple A he was still primarily playing third. Then when he got called up briefly he was only playing third. It wasn’t until he got sent back down the second time that they started having him work more at first than at third and now that he’s been called up he’s played almost exclusively at first base and it’s been well documented how hard he’s been working out before every game at first base.
Now why would the Orioles so suddenly decide that Mayo was a first baseman? They had years of watching him be a bad third baseman in the minors, he was poor defensively in his time in the majors and he didn’t look much better in Spring Training and yet until mid way through May they were treating him like he was going to be a major league third baseman. What changed?
The way I interpret how this all happened is that not only was the Orioles front office not sure about Coby Mayo this offseason but they were also not sure about Jackson Holliday. If the Orioles had been confident that Jackson Holliday would be their everyday second baseman they would have known that Jordan Westburg would be their everyday third baseman and that the most natural spot for Coby Mayo to fit onto this team in 2025 and going forward would be at first base.
Here are the different configurations of the future of the Orioles infield that they were playing with.
I call this one all the kids are good
C: Rutschman/Basallo
1B: Mayo
2B: Holliday
SS: Henderson
3B: Westburg
This one’s called “I think this Mayo has gone bad”
C: Rutschman
1B: Basallo
2B: Holliday
SS: Henderson
3B: Westburg
This is the one that front office was worried about in the offseason.
C: Rutschman
1B: Basallo
2B: Westburg
SS: Henderson
3B: Mayo
Obviously these aren’t all the possible configurations. There are definitely versions of the future where Adley never gets good again or Jordan Westburg is hurt forever or we extend O’Hearn or Mountcastle and trade a prospect for pitching but when it comes to looking at your top prospects and saying “here is where they’ll play when they get called up” the above lineups were your main options if you’re not going to trade anyone.
There are pros to keeping your options open the way the Orioles did by not having Mayo commit to first base earlier. The chief among them being that you limit the risk of what happens if Holliday is a bust.
Limiting risk is great but being more decisive would have benefited both Mayo and the Orioles.
If they had just decided we want Mayo at first, Holliday at second and Westburg at third and that’s our infield of the future, it would have made things a lot easier for them to start figuring out what to do with the rest of the roster. Additionally if they had made this decision and told Mayo you’re going to be our primary first baseman he could have been working at first base all winter and through spring training and not have to be playing catch up right now.
Instead, out of fear, they held onto all their players, both the veterans and the prospects and created a log jam. I imagine the concerns were along the lines of
What if we trade Mountcastle to make room for Mayo and then Mayo is a bust?
If we make Mayo our first baseman and Jackson Holliday is a bust and we have to move Westburg to second then who is our third baseman of the future?
I understand the risks, if you get rid of veterans to make room for these prospects and they stink then your roster is not going to be what you thought it was so for a moment let’s explore the worst case scenario.
Let’s say the Orioles had cleared space for Mayo to be the opening day first baseman with Holliday at second and they both ended up being terrible, can’t hit, can’t defend, negative WAR players.
What do you do then? Easy, O’Hearn takes on a more everyday role at first and Westburg slides over to second and Urias takes on an everyday role at third.
The Orioles had the depth in house to give Mayo and Holliday the nod as everyday players and be ok if they BOTH flamed out. Having that kind of depth should give a front office all the confidence in the world to trade away veteran players to make room for prospects and they still didn’t pull the trigger.
Look what happened! All that focus on risk aversion and not making trades and the team is 10 games under .500. The primary reason for the struggles is because the rotation is among the worst in the league and that’s the position group you could have strengthened if you had the testicular fortitude to make a decision and trade either Mayo or Mountcastle.
“Well we didn’t want to trade those guys because their trade value is low right now.”
Well now their trade value is even lower.
Not being able to make a decision on what position Coby Mayo should play made it so they didn’t know if they would need Ryan Mountcastle or not. If Mayo is the third baseman of the future then it makes sense to keep Ryan Mountcastle for the rest of his contract and it might even make sense to extend him. If Coby Mayo is the first baseman of the future then you’ve got to clear out space for him to play everyday so that he can figure things out at the big league level as soon as possible.
The fact that Mayo came up and struggled in 17 games changed very little about his prospect stature. Any serious talent evaluators that were high on Mayo before he was called up would not let such a small sample in the big leagues change their mind about him. In the offseason Mayo still had tremendous trade value so if you’re not confident enough that he’s your guy to clear a spot for him to play then you should trade him to a team that would value having a top 20 hitting prospect in exchange for a pitcher that would help your rotation that was projected to be the among worst in the majors by WAR by fangraphs before the season started!
You are supposed to make room for your top prospects. With the Orioles first batch of top prospects it was easy. It was easy to make Adley Rutschman the starting catcher over Robinson Chirinos and it was easy to make Gunnar Henderson the starting shortstop over Jorge Mateo.
It was a little tricky having Cowser take over for Austin Hays but I would say the front office messed up that transition up as well. If they had traded Hays in the offseason after he was an all star starter they could have gotten a pretty nice return and instead they delayed as long as they could because they weren’t confident in Cowser and the result was an uncomfortable log jam where players were frustrated and then they traded Hays for a much smaller return than they could have.
The theme is this front office is scared. They are scared to make the wrong decision so they delay and put it off for as long as possible until the decision gets made for them. The result is that the team has missed out on a rare opportunity to bolster its weaknesses by trading away excess veterans or prospects.
If they had traded Heston Kjerstad in 2023 or 2024 they could have gotten a legit player in return and now his trade value is almost 0. They could have traded Mounty in the offseason for a decent pitcher either to help the bullpen or the rotation and now they’ll get almost nothing for him assuming they don’t have to just DFA him. I already mentioned that they had an All Star starter that they didn’t even need anymore with 2 years of control left. The O’s could have gotten a great return for that player and instead they turned him into Seranthony Dominguez because they were too scared to just give Colton Cowser left field.
As I’ve said earlier in this blog I understand the risk, if you clear space for a rookie and they’re bad it puts you in a bad spot but that’s what guys like Ramon Urias and Dylan Carlson are for. You can find bench guys that can take over and play everyday if the prospect fails for relatively cheap. You don’t have to have every position filled by a top prospect or an all star you can get by with having averageish players.
Earlier I mentioned a worst case scenario where both Holliday and Mayo flamed out and Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Urias had to be the Orioles everyday starters at first and third. I think if that somehow had happened and we had to look at our farm system and say Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Urias are our best options at first and third for the next 3 seasons I think that would be totally fine.
You could say that it is good to hold onto all your players in case of injuries and that is partially true but again you can find guys like Ramon Laureano on a year to year basis to fill in for injured players on the cheap. You don’t have to hold your prospects in a log jammed Hell for years in case of injury, also the group most impacted by injuries (besides catcher for some reason) has been the pitching staff and that’s the group you could have reinforced by trading either Mayo or Mountcastle in the offseason.
This has gone on longer than I meant so I’ll be quicker with this next part.
In spring training the Orioles had Mayo waste his time at third even though he was never going to be a third baseman for the Orioles.
They called him back up as an injury replacement and sent him back down after a week like he’s Nick Maton or something.
They’ve called him back following the Mountcastle injury and again his playing time has been very sporadic. He played in 4 straight games when he got called and since then he hasn’t played in 3 straight games. He’s basically an every other day player and for no reason. Yes he’s splitting time with Ryan O’Hearn at first and DH but one of those spots is open every game and the Orioles will just DH other players instead of Mayo. When Adley went down you figured there might be more DH days open for Mayo but nope, there’s been no uptick in playing time.
When asked about it Mansolino just talks about how they’re still trying to win and they need to put the best lineup on the field but at the same time he clearly threw the game last night by leaving Matt Bowman in to try to save the bullpen to come back and win the rubber match.
So we don’t have to put the best pitcher possible on the mound but we do have to have the most platoon optimal lineup possible in the field? It seems to me that Coby Mayo is the only player losing out on opportunity to play for the sake of winning and the team is still not that good.
Mayo has been making steady improvements and looks more comfortable at the plate the more opportunities he gets but those opportunities are stunted when he rarely gets to play back to back games. If he had been the first baseman from the start I am confident by now he’d look like a middle of the order bat and instead we’re just barely getting signs of life in his bat.
Even with everything that has happened I still think Mayo is going to be a good player, I just think the O’s have made it about as hard on him as possible.
Hopefully the Orioles can find a way to give Mayo the appropriate opportunity to play while still trying to win. I don’t think playing him everyday would be the same as throwing in the towel so I say it’s possible to both compete and develop Mayo instead of doing what they are currently doing which is neither.
The Dishwasher 
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