It turns out you don’t have to make a splash to make a statement.
The Orioles’ Tuesday trade deadline haul — capped off by starter Trevor Rogers, outfielders Eloy Jiménez and Austin Slater, and reliever Gregory Soto four days after they added starter Zach Eflin, reliever Seranthony Domínguez, and outfielder Cristian Pache — was the dose of reason that both this team and many Orioles fans needed.
Hold your breath for the massive deadline addition all you want. This was another trade deadline in the key of Mike Elias, albeit at a much larger scale, and it served plenty of purposes. Just because pretty much the whole team has been playing poorly of late doesn’t mean they’re in such a bad spot to need major upgrades. The floor of the rotation has been reinforced, the bench solidified. The potential for future Orioles teams to be even better than this one remains high based on the top of the farm system and the young major league core.
The Orioles have four more qualified, experienced major league pitchers to deploy down the stretch than they did a week ago. All they need is to get to October, at which point it will matter far more what Corbin Burnes and Grayson Rodriguez do on the mound than the back-end starters.
If this team is so flawed as to need more than that, then they aren’t worth trading away the future for. They almost certainly got the most they could for what Elias and company were willing to move, a combination of players whose futures here were not guaranteed for a variety of reasons. Or, more to the point, for what other teams were willing to accept from the Orioles.
They did a lot, and they’ll probably be better for it.
The Orioles secured Eflin and Domínguez on Friday. They weren’t going to be left with the last available pitcher like last year, which had to be a calming influence to the extent one can exist in a front office at this time of year. They also probably felt like they weren’t going to have to make any crazy overpays for any further additions.
When the Orioles were constantly sellers, I heard from representatives of other clubs that Elias’ asks were often quite hefty when it came to valuing his own players in a trade. It’s that background, plus the Orioles’ eternal focus on valuations and not making a bad deal, that leads me to believe trading two plug-and-play major leaguers for Rogers is more a reflection of the market than the Orioles’ ability to operate in it.
But taken together, the Orioles traded Kyle Stowers, Connor Norby, Jackson Baumeister, Mac Horvath and Matthew Etzel — five talented young players, two ready and three a couple years away — for two pitchers who can help the Orioles this year and next at least. That feels like a reasonable haul.
The rest of the deals — Jiménez and Soto most notably — featured pitchers in Trey McGough, Seth Johnson or Moisés Chace who either needed to be protected from the Rule 5 draft this winter or were on the 40-man roster but not ready to help now. The Orioles trimmed their pitching stock before the league did it for them.
Different front offices value different things. The Padres under A.J. Preller have never blinked at making the massive, in-season swings like sending five prospects to the Marlins for two months of Tanner Scott. There are also the prospect-agnostics like Dave Dombrowski with the Phillies who feel myopically focused on improving that year’s team. Both are awesome for their teams and for the game.
So, too, is what Elias has built here: a fun, dynamic young lineup with three All-Stars who will be here for the better part of this decade and a trio of top-flight prospects in Jackson Holliday, Coby Mayo and Samuel Basallo to potentially add to it. If Norby and Stowers were the price for Rogers — a back-end starter with some upside for a team with the pitching chops the Orioles have — then someone from the group of Holliday, Mayo and Basallo would have been the price for a top-end starter. Holding onto them and putting faith in the Orioles’ burgeoning group of minor league starters will probably prove wise.
On Wednesday, all the smart folks with the capabilities to do so will update their projection models and playoff odds. The Orioles will still be near-locks to at least make the playoffs, and probably a little worse than a coin-flip to win the AL East over the Yankees. That’s just forecasts, not reality, but the reality isn’t so bad either.
Yes, the Orioles are at least a month removed from playing their best baseball, but for the two-plus months before that, they were the class of the league. Their lineup is probably closer to that than what we’ve seen recently, and while Eflin and Rogers aren’t Kyle Bradish and John Means, the Orioles are going to have a better chance to win on their start days than the previous replacements gave them.
Jiménez’s presence will do that, too. Trading Austin Hays took a right-handed hitting option away from manager Brandon Hyde, and he’ll be able to utilize Jiménez against lefties and keep other teams honest on that front.
Neither he nor Pache is hitting well at present, but both have the ability to hit the ball hard and make contact. Those are two traits the Orioles’ hitting staff can help hone, and potentially make the most of. Similarly, Rogers is a candidate for the Orioles to get back to his All-Star 2021 form. Eflin tweaked his mix Monday and threw more cutters than sinkers as he struck out a season-high seven batters. Soto throws hard and the Orioles will probably use him in good spots.
Perhaps it’s naïve to focus on the upside in the absence of stars coming in. But the Orioles create their own upside; they have through the draft and player development apparatus, they have through their pro scouting department’s scrap-heap additions, and they potentially have here in these trades.
It might not feel good to hear, but these are the types of acquisitions this team needed. There’s not much that can raise its ceiling, given the stars up and down the lineup and the two pitchers atop its rotation. It needed its floor to be raised so they can reach the heights they threatened early in the season. Now, it’s time to get back to being that team again.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Trey McGough’s surname.
