The Orioles finally have their general manager.
Baltimore is hiring Chicago Cubs assistant general manager Jared Banner to the role, ESPN's Jeff Passan reported Monday. Banner will report to Mike Elias, the team's president of baseball operations, and arrives after close to 20 years in a variety of executive jobs with the Cubs, New York Mets and Boston Red Sox.
News: The Baltimore Orioles are hiring Jared Banner as general manager, sources tell ESPN. Banner, who was an assistant GM with the Cubs, joins Mike Elias in Baltimore’s leadership after nearly two decades working a range of executive jobs with the Cubs, Mets and Red Sox.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) October 19, 2026
The hire is the clearest move yet in the front-office overhaul Elias promised after a season that ended with Baltimore formally eliminated from playoff contention in the final week and posting its first losing record since 2021.
A GM Search That Took Two Tries
The Orioles have technically been in the market for a general manager for more than a year. Elias, who was hired as GM in November 2018, was quietly elevated to president of baseball operations ahead of the 2026 season, and the club said at the time it intended to add a GM beneath him. That search never produced a hire, and Elias effectively kept doing both jobs through the year.
At his end-of-season press conference on Sept. 28, Elias reopened the process and acknowledged the operation needed more hands. He estimated Baltimore's front office ranked 29th of 30 teams in size, and said the club would conduct a full organizational review. Changes were already in motion: longtime analytics chief Sig Mejdal no longer oversees that department, and Matt Blood, the vice president of player and staff development, has left the organization.
Banner gives the Orioles a seasoned front office executive with a player-development background to complement Elias, whose own roots are in amateur scouting.
Who Is Jared Banner?
Banner, a Brooklyn native, played four years of varsity baseball as an outfielder at Amherst College and captained the team in 2007. He majored in psychology, and the school's pipeline of baseball executives — former Red Sox GM Ben Cherington and former Pirates GM Neal Huntington are both Amherst alumni — helped him land a baseball operations fellowship with Boston that same year.
What followed was an 11-year climb through nearly every corner of a front office.
Boston Red Sox (2007–2018)
Banner started in player development, where he spent years working on the minor league paths of players such as Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr. He moved to amateur scouting as a coordinator in 2010, became assistant director of player personnel in 2013, and finished his Boston tenure as vice president of player personnel in 2017-18. In that last role he oversaw the scouting of professional players in international leagues, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia, and helped bring right-hander Héctor Velázquez over from Mexico.
He also earned a seat in some of the organization's biggest rooms. Then-president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski had Banner sit in on the interviews that led to Alex Cora's hiring as manager, and Banner took part in the club's arbitration work as well. Boston won the World Series in 2018, his final season there.
New York Mets (2018–2020)
In December 2018, the Mets hired the 32-year-old Banner as their farm director under then-GM Brodie Van Wagenen, part of a wave of hires pulled from Boston's front office. Van Wagenen said at the time he wanted to add personnel with "a championship pedigree." Banner oversaw the franchise's minor league system as executive director of player development for two seasons, until a change in ownership led to an organization-wide overhaul.
Chicago Cubs (2020–2026)
Jed Hoyer brought Banner to Chicago in December 2020 as vice president of special projects, a reunion of sorts given their overlapping time in Boston. He was promoted to vice president of player development in 2022, and the Cubs' farm system took off on his watch — by late 2023, FanGraphs ranked it No. 1 in baseball, MLB Pipeline placed it fourth and Bleacher Report had it second.
That success earned him a promotion to assistant GM under Carter Hawkins and Hoyer in January 2024, filling the vacancy created when Craig Breslow left to run Boston's baseball operations. He held that role for three seasons. Among his notable contributions, per The Athletic, Banner identified Pete Crow-Armstrong as a trade target before Chicago acquired the center fielder from the Mets in 2021.
Earlier this month, The Athletic's Patrick Mooney and Ken Rosenthal reported Banner was also a candidate for the Athletics' GM opening following David Forst's departure, describing his background as spanning "scouting, player development and administration." Baltimore got him first.
What People Have Said About Him
Banner was flagged as a future general manager years before he became one. In a 2018 profile by Evan Drellich for NBC Sports Boston, Dombrowski said he believed Banner could run a front office someday, and Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy confirmed the club had quietly identified him as one of its internal rising stars.
Theo Epstein, who ran Boston's baseball operations when Banner arrived as an intern, recalled being struck by how thoroughly Banner handled his first solo assignment as an area scout — digging into a high-profile New England pitching prospect's background rather than coasting on the player's reputation. Epstein summed up his early impression bluntly: "Great passion for the game. He worked his ass off."
Banner has long credited former Royals GM Allard Baird — a fellow Red Sox executive who joined the Mets a week before Banner did — as his most important mentor, and has said the leadership lessons he took from Baird shaped the second half of his career more than any scouting fundamentals.
Why It Matters for Baltimore
The fit is easy to see on paper. The Orioles' biggest problems in 2026 weren't a shortage of talent so much as a failure to turn it into wins. Baltimore led the majors with 88 unearned runs, per The Banner, and too many of the young players the organization built around struggled to take the next step at the big-league level. A GM whose career has been defined by player development, and who helped build one of the sport's best farm systems in Chicago, gives Elias a partner in exactly the area the club identified as its weakest link.
Banner also inherits a roster with real pieces to work with: Gunnar Henderson, Jackson Holliday, Samuel Basallo and Coby Mayo among the homegrown core, Pete Alonso entering year two of his five-year, $155 million deal, and manager Craig Albernaz heading into his second season. The challenge is turning that group into something better than a team that flirted with .500 all summer and never held it.
Contract terms and Banner's introductory press conference had not been announced as of Monday.