Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubinstein wants you to know that he’s not anything like the guy that he bought the team from last year.
“This is a very important symbolic first step as we move forward,” Rubinstein said at a Saturday press conference to formally announce the deal with rookie catcher Samuel Basallo, who signed an eight-year, $67 million contract just a week into his big-league career, marking the franchise’s first long-term deal with a homegrown talent in more than a decade.
Among the guys on hand for the presser: shortstop Gunnar Henderson and catcher and former #1 overall pick Adley Rutschman, who, along with another former #1 overall pick, Jackson Holliday, are Rubinstein’s next targets.
“We hope we can have others like this at some point. We’re going to work on that,” the private equity billionaire said.
The miserly Peter Angelos bought the Orioles franchise in 1993; the O’s made just six playoff appearances in the 31 years that he owned the team, and never made the World Series under his management.
The latest roster teardown and rebuild, led by Angelos’s final GM, Mike Elias, has brought some top talent into the fold, though the talented-on-paper 2025 O’s are massively underachieving – sitting at 59-70 at this writing, after being a preseason pick to make it to the American League Playoffs for a third straight year.
“Everybody’s disappointed,” Rubenstein said. “In my own life, like many of you, I’ve had disappointments before. And you pick yourself up, you get back on your feet, you kind of do the best you can and move forward. So, we’re going to move forward.”
Rubinstein wanted to make clear: the Basallo signing is a big step forward.
Getting Henderson and Rutschman, who are both at the arbitration stage of their team-control years, and Holliday, who has two more pre-arbitration years before hitting the arbitration stage in the 2027 offseason, to commit, a la Basallo, has proven to be a challenge.
Henderson and Holliday are both represented by super-agent Scott Boras, which signals that they’re going to ride things out as far as they can, in the direction of getting a lot more money than $8.5 million-ish a year – think: $30 million-per as a starting point.
“This is something that is not easy for the organization or players to line up on, that’s part of it, that’s OK,” Elias said at the Saturday presser. “But we work very hard at this, and any time we think there’s an opportunity to line up and have it make sense for both parties, it’s something that we discuss and explore.”
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Chris Graham
