This year, it’s a fresh dread.

There’s always some kind of anxiety around the trade deadline where the Orioles are concerned, at least over the decade I’ve written about the team. And it’s not the anxiety of news coming at any moment — that’s part of the deal — but more about what they’d actually do at the deadline.

I thought they were finished back in 2018 before Jonathan Schoop, Kevin Gausman and Darren O’Day went out the door right at the 4 p.m. deadline, and I had to recalibrate everything. In the ensuing years, right on through the Trey Mancini trade, my stomach turned at the idea of having to explain why such an ultimately unpleasant decision had some merit.

In recent years, it’s been anxiety over the positions I’ve taken that the team wasn’t going to make the massive splash many were hoping for, and the ultimate value those stances held.

This year? I just dread that the deadline exists at all.

Everyone who has followed this team, from the earliest signs of weakness through their deepest fits of underperformance, has used the July 31 deadline as a checkpoint for their season. With the extra wild-card teams, playing good enough baseball through the month of July would put the team on a trajectory to be in the mix come the end of September.

If not, well, to the chop shop go the 2025 Orioles.

Simple enough — except there’s a lot of ground between being .500 and fully back in the mix and being well and truly out of it, and that ground feels like where the Orioles are going to land. They’re objectively playing better of late, at 25-21 under interim manager Tony Mansolino, and are 24-15 since the karmic, not-exactly-a-swap swap of Cionel Pérez coming off the roster before Trevor Rogers made his 2025 debut in the second half of their May 24 doubleheader. That’s basically a 100-win pace.

But because the second half of that doubleheader kicked off a stretch of nine wins in 11 and the Orioles are hovering around .500 (15-13) since, it feels like the progress has stalled. That’s hard to argue.

They have 20 games left before the deadline. If the Orioles are hovering around 10 games under .500 at that point, then trading away pending free agents and reinforcing the upper levels of the minors is the obvious move.

As it stands, a shade under three-quarters of this season (119 of 162 games) is going to be played under Mansolino. The halfway mark comes when the Orioles wrap up a three-game series in Cleveland on July 24, a week before the deadline. If the Orioles win at their post-Rogers pace in the 13 games before then, they’d be 48-54. Win at that pace in the 20 games before the deadline and it’s 52-57. Win at that pace the rest of the season and it’s 85-79 — right at the edge of where you’d expect the last wild-card team to be.

If that feels like a lot of hoping, that’s what it is — and the Orioles make decisions based on data with far more predictive value than that. The problem is that they must make these decisions at all.

It would be completely irresponsible not to turn two months of a player who isn’t going to be on the team next year into longer-term value, and nothing shy of this three-game winning streak turning into a 10-gamer is liable to stop the Orioles from executing those trades at this point.

No team is ever actually whole — the Orioles are learning this the hard way — but it feels increasingly clear the best version of this club is still to come. I feel less and less convinced that theory will be able to be tested, mostly because the trade deadline exists.

This team has been frustrating for so many reasons. Imagine wanting to see more of it on its current trajectory? Well, I think I do. The existence of the trade deadline is a large impediment to that.

On the pod

Danielle Allentuck joined Paul and me on the podcast this week to talk about her article on Kyle Bradish’s recovery from Tommy John surgery, which gave a lot of life to a very long and arduous process. We also talked about the potential changes for the Orioles’ rotation with Tyler Wells and Grayson Rodriguez on the mend, too.

Ballpark Chatter

“He stunk yesterday, that’s the beautiful part about Jackson [Holliday]. You start to see maybe the average go below .250 or the OPS dip below .700, you know, and then you start to worry, is he going to be OK? Then he walks out today, no big deal. And that’s just one of the many reasons why he’s going to be a really good player in this league for a long time.” — Orioles interim manager Tony Mansolino after Holliday’s four-hit game Sunday.

I love that Mansolino talks like this. It’s refreshing, and I know there’s been some scrutiny about some of the things he’s said to the media since taking over, but this just made me smile. It’s also a way to call out something that has been true. Holliday had fallen off a bit. Since his OPS hit .787 on May 18, he’d fallen below .700 thanks to a .626 OPS with strikeouts in 27.7% of his plate appearances before Sunday’s breakout. Everything Mansolino said is true. And I like how he said it.

By the numbers

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Trevor Rogers’ revival has been a bright spot for a lot of reasons, and one pitch in particular makes me think it could be durable. According to MLB’s Statcast data, Rogers threw his sweeper — a longer, more horizontal version of a slider — a season-high 13 times Sunday in Atlanta and had four of his six strikeouts on the offering. He’s yet to allow a hit on his sweeper this season, with six strikeouts overall on the pitch. He’s gaining more confidence with it, and as his return to the Orioles’ rotation continues, I bet it’s something that will continue to develop as a bat-misser in Rogers’ arsenal.

Talent Pipeline

Jordan Sánchez, a 19-year-old Cuban outfielder the Orioles landed late in the 2023 signing period, was one of the more productive hitters in the Dominican Summer League for the club last year and is following that up stateside in the Florida Complex League. He was the FCL’s June player of the month after batting .340 with a 1.004 OPS in 17 games. Sánchez is putting together an impressive season, with a .969 OPS thanks to 17 extra-base hits and a 16.3% walk rate. His wRC+ of 166 is best among FCL qualifiers. Sánchez signed for $450,000 for a reason — his is an advanced offensive skillset, and in addition to a good approach, he hits the ball hard at good angles, giving him an attractive corner-outfield profile.

For further reading

🧢 Dads of the Orioles: Andy’s story on the Orioles’ dad trip was quite fun. None of these players would be here without their families. This was a really fun way to honor that.

🏃‍♂️ ‘It’s just creating havoc’: I also thought his story on the team’s baserunning was a sharp one. I know it was a goal of the front office to run more this year, and the Orioles as ever talked a big game in spring and then didn’t really do it once the season started. Now, Mansolino is making that happen.

💪 Arms on the Farm: The Orioles are undefeated since Arms on the Farm finally returned. Trey Gibson won Eastern League Pitcher of the Week Monday. Coincidence?

🔍 Playing like a first-rounder: It’s a good week to be Andy in this newsletter. I loved learning about Nate George, a late-round pick from last year’s draft who has popped in the low minors this year.