Leave it to Mike Elias and the Orioles to execute a trade that very much exists in a vacuum at a time when so much about this team — its near-term future, how he handles the trade deadline and how the Orioles eventually get back to being the playoff team they’re meant to be — hangs in the balance.

But that’s really what we have here. Bryan Baker is a Ray as of Thursday morning and presumably for the next several years because Tampa Bay was willing to give up the 37th pick in Sunday’s draft.

Baker, a waiver claim after the 2021 season who was a useful part of the team’s bullpen for two seasons and is in his second spell as an effective setup man after a turbulent 2024, is under control for three more seasons.

Given the opportunity to add the 37th pick in the draft — Baltimore’s seventh of the first day, which adds $2.631 million to its bonus pool for a league-high $19.145 million — the club decided the benefits and the value of another young player added to the organization outweighed what Baker could provide.

The timing of Sunday’s draft, a few weeks before the trade deadline, meant the Orioles had to execute the deal before the broader trade landscape and their role in it came into focus.

Elias’ admission that this trade was “a step in [the] direction” of selling felt frank, fitting and foreboding. For many, that’s the main takeaway here, and it should be. As for this deal’s context, he boiled it down simply.

Elias said: “It’s earlier than my comfort level, but I thought it was a really good return and a good trade for everyone. So, we did it.”

That satisfies the why of this trade, but that’s not really enough. Not with all that’s at stake for the Orioles in 2025 and beyond over these next few weeks. So, if you’re trying to glean anything from this trade and Elias’ comments around it, here’s what it should mean to you, depending on where you sit.

If you run another team: Make a good offer. The Orioles will gladly take it.

That’s basically what happened here, and I think it ultimately speaks to how they’re going to approach the next three weeks. The core of the team feels off limits, and Elias indicated as much when he simply replied “yes” when asked if he was committed to building a winner for 2026 and not rebuilding again.

But, for all the potential free agents this team has, from qualifying offer candidates (Ryan O’Hearn, Cedric Mullins and Zach Eflin) to the still-valuable players outside that strata (Seranthony Domínguez, Gregory Soto, Charlie Morton and Ramón Laureano), the view is probably going to be more about whether the Orioles feel they’re getting enough value back versus how it impacts the rest of this season.

That’s been the spirit of a lot of their moves outside of the 2024 season, when things were weighted heavily toward winning that year, and it’s a comfortable place to operate. I’ve heard from other clubs that the Orioles’ asking prices are typically high, and that means they’ll stand pat when they aren’t met. The value-in, value-out proposition checked out for the Rays with Baker. If you want anyone else on this roster, feel free to do the same.

If you’re in the Orioles clubhouse: Sure, keep it up.

Elias said: “This team is playing much, much better this season, and I think we’ve been playing at a playoff clip for a while, and the team is looking more and more like it should and like itself. And I think that we can continue to play really well and we’re not relenting or taking our foot off the gas pedal.”

He added that the team is “moving in the right direction and we still have a lot of time left before the trade deadline.” But he also noted the Orioles are “not playing exactly the way we want,” with some losses of late that “could have easily gone the other way, and it would have been nice to have those.”

There are plenty of examples, and right now a handful of wins on the Orioles’ record would probably have a real influence on their course of action for the rest of the month. So basically his message to them was we’ve dug a big hole and you’re playing well enough outside of that circumstance to feel good, but for it to make any difference, they need to basically be flawless and not stumble again in these next three weeks. And even then some decisions will happen irrespective of where the team is in a couple of weeks.

If you’re sad about this Orioles season: They haven’t packed it in yet.

You’ll remember at the 2022 trade deadline, when the Orioles dealt Trey Mancini and Jorge López from a surging roster, that Elias noted it was “not a probability” that the Orioles would grab a wild-card spot. Their FanGraphs playoff odds on the morning of that trade (Aug. 1) were 2.1%. On Thursday he dealt the setup man from a 40-50 team that woke up with a 2.6% chance of making the playoffs and said it was “mathematically possible” to win enough games to change the deadline plans and maybe even be a buyer.

Sweet, sweet progress.

That said, he noted Detroit traded some key players and kept others last year before going on a run in the second half and that there’s enough talent on the roster (active or otherwise) to help the Orioles win games the rest of the way.

“I think this team is moving in a good direction out on the field and we’re going to have guys getting healthy and coming up to help the team, but right now this is a trade that we wanted to make and sometimes this job is a balancing act, where you’ve got to do things that aren’t perfectly in one direction than another,” he said.

So if you’re holding out hope, Elias didn’t necessarily shut the door on a turnaround for the ages.

If you’re angry about this Orioles season: This is how they start getting better for next year.

This is still a massive hole for the team to climb out of, and the sensible thing to do is to use this as an opportunity to improve for the future. The future might be closer than it was in the rebuilding days, though.

Elias and interim manager Tony Mansolino pushed back on the idea that acquiring a draft pick for several more years of a contributing reliever wasn’t going to help the team much in the near term by pointing out that recently drafted players can be traded in the offseason. That suggests any near-term moves that might make the 2025 team less competitive could be in service of accumulating assets to ship out for accretive additions to the 2026 team.

The Orioles pushed a lot of chips in for 2024 and that certainly didn’t change the stakes for this year, but this draft was always going to be a way for them to replenish their minor league talent base in a period of transition for the farm system. Adding picks — and acknowledging the value of high draft picks in trades in a way Elias never really has before — feels meaningful in that it says it’s something he’s at least thinking about and maybe has even made peace with doing.

If you own the Orioles: They’ve got a plan to fix this.

Upon firing manager Brandon Hyde in May, Elias stressed that the Orioles were going to reevaluate everything they did at every level of baseball operations to try to prevent further lost seasons. I think this trade in a lot of ways illustrates they’re not going to change the spirit of what they do, considering it’s still just about amassing more future value. But it seems like they’re going to perhaps deploy or realize that value differently than in the past by more liberally trading prospects because they’ll feel better about the overall depth.

Even acknowledging the value of young players in trades, as opposed to just how valuable they are to a team like the Orioles, feels like a change in tune that signals an openness to build the next contender in a different way than Elias has. His way of doing business clearly resonates with this new ownership group, but it didn’t buy this team on the trajectory it was on for a season like this. It feels like we’re starting to see signs of how Elias might adjust to prevent that going forward.