You can argue, probably fairly, that the Orioles being in a position to trade nine players off the major league roster in July was a result of half-measures and at times tepid attempts to build a championship roster around their talented homegrown core, with bad luck and injuries mixed in.

They did not tiptoe into the teardown, though. This massive trade deadline matched the scale of the failed season that caused it.

There are plenty of reasons this happened and a lot of benefits that will come from it. But it will be a while before they’re accepted, or realized, because even the most blatant breadcrumbing of their plans to trade off parts couldn’t prepare anyone for the magnitude of this.

Even as their core remains intact, and with it the promise of winning baseball here this decade, little around it does.

Nine major leaguers out this month, including a franchise fixture in Cedric Mullins and all the rest of their pending free agents minus the injured Zach Eflin and the mercurial Tomoyuki Sugano, plus Ramón Laureano and some players who could have chipped in on a winning team next year. Sixteen prospects in, almost all pitchers with the kind of high-octane stuff the Orioles covet.

The Orioles spent two years among the contenders buying at the deadline and had the opportunity to experience the leverage the handful of sellers had from the other side. Now, with a large cohort of players nearing free agency who would be more useful on a contender than a team that fell out of contention in May, they took the opportunity to flip them all and live in a world where they’re comfortable, if not outright adept.

Stack those opportunities, one by one, and this is what it looks like. Two months (or in some cases, a year and two months) of a player with near-term value transformed into any number of younger players who have a chance to help for six or seven years if they come good.

Once you start making those moves, there’s not really any use stopping. And the Orioles didn’t.

That, in a nutshell, is the why. Other than sentiment, a department the Orioles don’t care about but maybe in some cases should, there’s no valid reason to avoid what they did this month once these circumstances take hold. It’s a bummer, but the outcome of the season doesn’t change much. Once you’re not going to make the playoffs, doing so with 78 or 72 wins is immaterial.

It’s a little murkier for the likes of Laureano, Andrew Kittredge, Ramón Urías and Bryan Baker — the first two with player options for 2026 and the other two under club control beyond this year as well. The explanation we’ll likely hear from general manager Mike Elias, when we get it, is that the extreme seller’s market made it so the Orioles’ return was enough to justify the near-term hit.

At that point, there’s an opportunity cost to not making the moves and perhaps regretting it, but there’s another element at play. Put aside Laureano — who has been great this year and, at $6.5 million for his 2026 club option, will be a steal if he maintains that form — and you can say there’s an opportunity cost to keeping those players around, as well.

If you have Urías or Kittredge already on the roster for next year, there’s less incentive to do better in those spots. The bullpen appears to be so threadbare that Kittredge and Baker would be nice to have around, but these trades put the onus on the front office not to settle for simply good enough as it rebuilds the roster around a core of Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson and all their homegrown stars.

By trading everyone they have, though, the Orioles are taking an incredible near-term hit, on and off the field, in service of preventing a season like this from happening again. The minor league depth they’ve added may not meaningfully change the top of their prospect rankings, but it does a few things to the organization as a whole.

One is it gives the team many more chances to develop the homegrown pitchers to sustain major league success, a process already underway but that has plenty of attrition baked in. It also expands the tradable talent base, which the Orioles are going to need if they’re to make the necessary additions and upgrades to get back into contention in 2026.

Even squinting won’t let you see the tangible value for many, if any, of these players on the 2026 Orioles. But the Orioles need the talent they brought in a lot more than the players they shed from their major league roster. They also need to see some value on the field at Camden Yards from these incremental additions of long-term value they made this month.

And it goes without saying they need to attack whatever comes next in supporting a team that can return to the playoffs and win a game, or a series, or a championship, with the same fervor they did this deadline: wholeheartedly and at significant scale.