What Stood Out About the Orioles Trade Deadline

Deadline day is hectic. There are livestreams of people reacting to trades, there are posts and opinions and crash outs. It’s a fun day on the internet although admittedly less fun if your team is being dismantled. 

The Orioles made a lot of trades this year. If you count the Bryan Baker trade from a few weeks ago in total the Orioles made 8 trades, sending out 9 major league players for 16 prospects. 

As far as my reaction to each trade and what the Orioles got, that will actually be a different blog posted a little bit later (all the prospects are in the lower minors so there is plenty of time to react) this blog is about what stood out about the Orioles trade deadline and what it means for their upcoming offseason and how they become contenders again. 

The Prospects were so young

One of the things I believed going into this deadline was that the Orioles needed to target players that could contribute to the major league team in 2026 so I was expecting the O’s to bring in a few upper minors type players that could either play later this season in the Majors or debut sometime in 2026. 

I even made a list of 87 Starting pitching prospects in the upper minors that I thought they might pursue. From that list 14 players total were traded on Thursday including 5 of the top 25 but of those 87 the Orioles traded for only 1 of them. So clearly Elias disagreed that upper minors pitching prospects should be the focus of the deadline.

10 of the 15 prospects the Orioles traded for have not even reached Double A and 7 of them are yet to reach High A, meaning the majority of the prospects the Orioles got at this trade deadline are about as far away from playing in the big leagues as a prospect can get. 

So what does this mean? 

Because the Orioles only acquired one starting pitcher who could even MAYBE make it to the big leagues in 2026 this offseason they will have to be incredibly active in building their rotation. Right? There’s no way they could go into next offseason thinking we’ve got Trevor Rogers, Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez at the top of the rotation, all we need is a couple innings eaters, right? They have to have learned their lesson right? 

For my own sanity I have to believe the Orioles front office knows they can’t make the same mistake with the rotation 2 years in a row and will be highly motivated to ensure next year won’t be an exact repeat of 2025. 

So that means this offseason is put up or shut up for Mike Elias and Co. They are going to have to sign or trade for at least 2 and maybe even 3 starting pitchers and I might be coping here but it is possible that some of these new prospects will play a role in eventually acquiring starting pitching. 

Either some of these prospects will be part of a package for a starter or the fact that these prospects have entered the system will free up the Orioles to put other prospects already in the system on the table in trades. 

What else does this mean? 

Elias targeting such young prospects signals that he feels very secure about his job as General Manager of the Orioles. GMs on the hot seat aren’t usually too worried about the bullpen depth of the low A affiliate and at trade deadlines you’ll see them be more aggressive making moves that will impact the major leagues sooner than later. 

There are pros and cons to Mike Elias’ job security. The con is that I would like him to be fired because he has done a bad job transitioning from rebuilding to contending and the fact that he doesn’t feel pressure to win now means that he has likely been told he has a long runway to get the team back on track. The pro is that Mike Elias is really bad at win now moves so if he felt pressure to make win now moves at this deadline the results might have been disastrous. 

Maybe David Rubenstein is the kind of cutthroat operator who would tell his GM that he’s got job security to keep the GM from panicking at the deadline and then after the GM has set the future up nicely have him fired and replaced with someone who knows how to build a contender. IDK though. 

The positions the prospects play 

11 of the 15 prospects the Orioles acquired at this deadline were pitchers and 7 of those 11 were relief pitchers. Why would that be the case? 

The Orioles have had a pretty set bullpen for the past 3-4 seasons, Felix Buatista, Yennier Cano, Keegan Akin, Bryan Baker and Cionel Perez have all been in the Orioles bullpen since at least 2022 and were all active at points in 2025. It is not super common to have over half your bullpen be the same 5 guys over 4 seasons and with the additions of Dominguez, Soto and Kittredge who were also veterans the Orioles had been dealing with a bullpen that offered them very little flexibility as far being able to option guys who were struggling or needed a refresh. 

Smart teams usually have young bullpens with lots of interchangeable arms bouncing up and down between AAA and the majors throughout the season to keep fresh. By interchangeable arms I don’t mean that half the arms in the bullpen are triple A quality I mean that they have more quality relievers than can fit on the 26 man roster at a time and that guys that they really like sometimes go down for a few weeks. 

The Orioles have not had an exciting relief arm come up through the minors since??? 

Anyway it will be interesting to see how these relief pitching prospects progress through the system. Relief pitchers can rise rapidly since they don’t have to get built up like starters and command issues that would keep a starter in the minors can be tolerated in the bullpen. 

Trading for bullpen prospects is also interesting because due to their lack of positional value a relief pitching prospect can be pretty talented and still not ranked very highly by the different prospect ranking services. 

Relief pitching is so volatile that all it takes is a minor adjustment in an offseason and someone who was inconceivable as a major league pitcher can be lights out and very impactful. On the flip side if relief pitchers don’t succeed there’s nothing really to fall back on, a bad starter can become a decent reliever a bad reliever has to sign up for LinkedIn so it’s just as likely that some of these Single A relievers we got never make the majors. 

The Orioles were due for a bullpen refresh, this offseason they’ll probably have to sign an arm or two but hopefully they can transition guys like McDermott and Povich who might get squeezed out of rotation spots and then call up some of their recently acquired prospects like Cam Foster or Tyson Neighbors and suddenly have a much more flexible and affordable bullpen.

The Orioles traded guys with control

This was something I was pretty surprised by, I had assumed that guys with control would only be traded if a team made an offer that Elias couldn’t refuse, similar to how the Rays bowled him over by offering a first round pick for Bryan Baker. However the returns on at least the Ramon Urias and Andrew Kittredge trades seem to point to Elias trading these guys for pretty much whatever he could get. Twine Palmer and Wilfri De La Cruz could be decent prospects but they feel like the kinds of prospects that the Orioles could have gotten from trading away rental pieces rather than guys with another year of control. 

If the Orioles had traded Ramon Urias at next year’s deadline would unranked relief prospect Twine Palmer have been off the table? I don’t think so. 

None of these guys were very expensive next year either so what this tells me is that these trades were just as much about clearing space for young guys to play the rest of this season as it was about getting value for these controllable players. 

The rest of the 2025 season should be all about deciding who can help the team win in 2026 and beyond. By moving Urias and Laureano you free up at bats to give to Dylan Beavers and Jeremiah Jackson not to mention Coby Mayo and Samuel Basallo. 

If Beavers can show the O’s something in the last few months of the season that changes their plans for the offseason when looking for a starting corner outfielder. If Jackson can prove he’s a big leaguer then suddenly the O’s have a young capable bench player on a rookie deal. 

There is definitely a part of me that thinks about moving Urias and Laureano and thinks “Well if they just kept Urias and Laureano that would solve your outfield and infield depth for next season” and there certainly is an element of Peter Griffin choosing the mystery box over the boat but I think part of it is the prospect value you get from trading the proven guys to let the unproven guys get a chance to prove themselves is enough to make it worth it. 

If you combined Jordyn Adams with Ryan O’Hearn does that get you 6 Padres prospects? Probably not. If you offered the Astros Jeremiah Jackson for Twine Palmer would they say yes? Probably, honestly that Ramon Urias’ trade is very strange to me. 

The Orioles will need another outfielder next season 

By trading Cedric, Laureano and to a lesser degree O’Hearn the Orioles cut loose a bunch of major league outfield depth. They’ll have Cowser in center full time now, O’Neill will have to play the field a bunch more in right and then next season left field is currently a mystery.

I mentioned Dylan Beavers will have a chance to prove himself but I don’t think Beavers is a slam dunk to be the future left fielder in Baltimore. Other in-house options include Heston Kjerstad getting healed from whatever he’s got going on, Dylan Carlson becoming a mainstay, Jud Fabian taking a massive leap forward, Coby Mayo or Samuel Basallo learning a new position and Enrique Bradfield basically skipping triple A. 

Other things to consider are this, they need a 4th outfielder who can play center (maybe that is Adams now and then Bradfield as soon as he’s ready) and Tyler O’Neill gets hurt all the time so it might be wise to plan for when that happens. 

As I mentioned above some of the young guys will be given a chance to make their case but in all likelihood this means the Orioles will be active in free agency looking for a corner outfielder and with how much money they are going to have to spend to rebuild the rotation and bullpen it’ll be interesting to see how much goes towards getting a serviceable outfielder.

Did this deadline change how I feel about Mike Elias? 

In the past few weeks between the draft and the trade deadline the front office did a lot to build up the Orioles farm system which had been drained over the last few seasons as guys had gotten promoted or used in trades so that was good work by Mike Elias, I think he deserves as hand shake and a pat on the back for his work. 

The issue is that I have never doubted Mike Elias’ ability to build up a farm system, that has never been a problem with him. The problem is that he is not good at making win now moves, he is too conservative when he’s trying to trade for stars and he’s too risk averse to sign anyone to a long term deal in free agency and as “good” as his deals at this deadline might have been nothing that happened make me feel like he’s going to be able to make the right moves in offseason to get this team contending again. 

I mentioned earlier and I know other people have said things along the lines that he can take the prospects he just drafted and traded for and trade them for something that will help the team now and as much as I hope that is true what reason do we have to believe that he will actually do that if he does it that he will do a good job. 

In 7 years as GM he has made 1 truly great win now move and that was the Corbin Burnes trade which went about as perfectly as any 1 year rental has ever gone and if you listened to him talk about that trade at last year’s winter meetings it sounds like he was traumatized by it.  

He gave like a half a dozen different quotes basically saying “It’s really hard to make moves like that every year, we can’t really be expected to do that again.” 

But here’s the thing: teams that want to win the World Series DO makes moves like that every year. 

The Rangers signed Macus Semien and Corey Seager and then the next year added Degrom, Eovaldi, Montgomery and Scherzer. 

The Yankees traded for Juan Soto one offseason and then when he left signed Max Fried and traded for Cody Bellinger. 

The Dodgers add another MVP candidate every other season. 

People make jokes that the Padres GM goes on coke fueled rampages at the deadline because he makes so many win now moves. 

Mike Elias is just not in that club, he doesn’t get excited at the idea of pushing in his chips he gets scared and that’s why a year after trading for Corbin Burnes his big offseason addition was Charlie Morton and Tomoyuki Sugano because they were cheap and allowed him to keep long term payroll flexibility and didn’t cost him any prospects. 

Think of Mike Elias like a corner outfielder who is in his last year of arbitration. During his time with the team he started out hot but he has disappointed and declined the last couple seasons but he just had a good stretch to finish out his last season before free agency. 

Would Mike Elias give that player a big contract? No. He would shake their hand and say thank you for your service, good luck in free agency and we’ll make a nice tribute video when you come back to town. 

The Orioles need to give Mike Elias the Mike Elias treatment, thanks for what you did and good luck in your next endeavor. There is no reason to keep him around in 2026 because he did a good job drafting in 2019. 

Other trade deadline thoughts

 Here are just some non Orioles thoughts I had on the trade deadline. 

First here is the list of young pitchers I had on my list that got traded , with where I had them ranked and where they were traded to: 

6	Taj Bradley	Minnesota
7	Mick Abel	Minnesota
13	Kendry Rojas	Minnesota
19	Henry Baez	Athletics
22	Khal Stevens	Cleveland
35	Kohl Drake	Arizona
37	Ryan Bergert	Kansas City
43	Mitch Bratt	Arizona
46	Blade Tidwell	San Francisco
51	Jauron Watts Brown	Baltimore
54	Braden Nett	Athletics
57	Ryan Gallagher	Minnesota
58	Trystan Vreiling	San Francisco
65	Duncan Davitt	Chicago

So as you might imagine I am very intrigued by the Twins deadline. The Twins were very aggressive at the deadline, they traded multiple players that had multiple years of control and people are talking about them like they are about to go into a long rebuild. 

However you look at who they got at the deadline and I’m not sure that is the case. Assuming they don’t trade they’re remaining veteran starters next season they could have a rotation of Pablo Lopez, Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, Taj Bradley and Mick Abel with Kendry Rojas knocking on the door plus they have a few of their own pitching prospects near the majors so some of these guys are expendable. 

They could turn around and say “Hey Red Sox you want Joe Ryan? Send over Jarren Duran, Jhostynxon Garcia, David Sandlin and Tristan Casas for good measure and you can have him.” and suddenly you have 3 major league bats with multiple years of control all at positions of weakness. 

The AL Central is full or penny pinchers and cowards so even though the Twins just sold as aggressively as we’ve seen in recent years they could be competing for the division next year if they want to. 

If they want to being the key part of that sentence since there is a decent chance they trade Lopez, Ryan, Ober and Buxton and complete the teardown in which case they would not be competitive but all I’m saying is that they put themselves in an interesting position that isn’t as dire as people might think. 

What the heck is going on with Craig Breslow

I am obsessed with this guy. He goes from trading and extending Garret Crochet (awesome) to trading Rafael Devers because he was incapable of having a normal conversation (WEIRD). 

At this deadline he was clearly locked in on Joe Ryan and since we literally saw the trade completed graphic posted I have to assume it was so close to getting done but then suddenly didn’t. 

In the aftermath it would appear the Twins have been leaking that Breslow is bad to work with and that the offers they were getting from the Red Sox were feeble. The Red Sox in turn have leaked what their offer was and it certainly doesn’t seem feeble. 

What happened here? Maybe I haven’t been paying attention but I feel like it’s rare that a GM’s abrasive personality be a story so many times in a calendar year. How many times can something go wrong with the Red Sox and then be followed by stories of the GM being annoying before he’s fired? 

I’m fascinated. 

Lastly the Leo De Vries for Mason Miller trade was the biggest splash of the whole deadline. In the moment I got online and praised AJ Preller for taking the Padres window seriously and continuing to push in his chips. 

I do stand by the idea that Preller’s style of going for it is a good thing for San Diego but the more I think about it I do question this particular move. 

Leo De Vries was the best prospect traded in almost a decade and if he was on the market I think the Padres could have gotten a lot of players that weren’t even considered to be on the trade market. 

Would the Guardians trade Jose Ramirez? Would the Brewers trade Jackson Chourio? Would the Twins have given you Joe Ryan and Griffin Jax? I don’t know. 

If you have decided to use De Vries to make your team better is a closer (I know JP Sears was in the deal but I kind of think of it as De Vries for Miller and the other prospects for Sears) the best use of that very valuable chip? 

Miller is under control for 5 years so I’m sure the Padres will get a ton of value from him but they have real holes in the roster that need to be addressed obviously they got O’Hearn and Laureano to fill in but those are short term solutions. 

I’m not saying it was a bad deal but I do wonder if we don’t look back and think that De Vries would have been better leveraged towards getting a really good outfielder.