Given the option last week to describe what a good rest of July would be for the Orioles, general manager Mike Elias had plenty of directions to go — the draft, the weeks of games remaining before the July 31 trade deadline and their subsequent decisions on how to proceed at that point.

The two months of actual baseball that follow are going to matter a lot. I still think, even as trades impact the roster, that this team is going to play good baseball down the stretch to platform for a return to its proper level in 2026.

“We’ll see what the next few weeks bring.”

Orioles general manager Mike Elias

But that’ll all be a postscript to a spell that began a week ago with the Bryan Baker trade and will end when this month does. This stretch is pivotal for the Orioles, with the slim chance that the team goes on a run and returns to the playoff picture overshadowed by a singular opportunity to prevent a repeat of the season-opening calamity that tanked 2025.

“I’d like to win as many of those games as possible,” Elias said. “I hope the draft falls— I hope we do the right thing in the draft room with our process, do the best as we can on the board, and hope it falls the way that we want. And I hope we have good luck on top of that on draft night, and to whatever degree that we make trades, I hope that we evaluate the talent well and do moves that are positive for the organization over the long term. This is something that was not our plan, to be trading players off the major league team right now in July. But we’re responding to the situation. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring.”

It’s been three years since the Orioles made trades away from their major league roster, but the value of doing so has a different shade than it did then, before the team really started to contend.

At that point, trading Trey Mancini and Jorge López, to say nothing of Alex Cobb and Jose Iglesias and so many others before them, came down to the longer-term value of players who were going to be off the roster due to free agency in a year or two.

That always applies from a basic math standpoint, but teams trying to win are happy to ignore it in pursuit of a championship. The Orioles have pending free agents all over their roster whom other teams could want: All-Star Ryan O’Hearn plus outfielders Cedric Mullins and Ramón Laureano from their cohort of everyday players, plus starters Zach Eflin, Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano and relievers Seranthony Domínguez and Gregory Soto.

Others who are under club control for next year but who could be valuable to another club include Trevor Rogers, Andrew Kittredge, Ryan Mountcastle and Ramón Urías.

Trading those pending free agents would diminish what interim manager Tony Mansolino has at his disposal for the remainder of the season but wouldn’t materially change what the next version of a winner in Baltimore would look like.

Considering the Orioles had a particularly strong draft, with their early-round college bats closing what feels like a bit of a gap in their overall organizational depth, any potential trades would supplement a farm system that boasts compelling pitching potential and all kinds of lottery tickets in the low minors from the international scouting department.

Adding a dozen prospects, from nearly major league-ready ones to lower-level fliers, to this group would serve two purposes. One is it would help backfill gaps from last year’s deadline trades when the Orioles severely cut into their prospect depth that could support the major league team in pursuit of pitching improvements.

Second, and perhaps more important, this is an opportunity to load up on ammunition that can help the Orioles supplement the remaining, still-attractive young core of this team via trade. It’s kind of understood around the game that it’s easier to trade players you traded for than those you signed as amateurs — the relationships and connections aren’t the same.

Having a bucket of prospects the Orioles like enough to think they can help but also who they wouldn’t mind flipping — a la Seth Johnson, whom the Orioles acquired in the Mancini trade but dealt two years later to help bring in Soto — would give Elias even more ammunition to add a controllable starting pitcher or otherwise improve the 2026 Orioles this winter.

That’s what this is all really about: preventing this from ever happening again. Roster-wise, the merits of the offseason leading into this one are going to be debated for a while. The results say it didn’t work out, mostly because of injuries but also poor starting pitching in the first seven weeks of the season. And the result of all the one-year deals they signed is now they can trade those players and regroup come November.

Such deals would probably undermine the current product, but the top of the lineup down the stretch will still include Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg, so it won’t be pointless. There will be opportunities for young starters to grab rotation spots before Kyle Bradish, Tyler Wells and Grayson Rodriguez return, and bullpen roles available for those whose future is there.

Those who are particularly scarred by how the last year or so of Orioles baseball has gone are probably going to need to see something different, conceptually, in how this team is built this winter to believe again in 2026. But these core players finishing strong is going to account for most of the optimism or skepticism around this team, and the potential for them to do so is there.

Elias has a lot of decisions to make, and fast, to get this organization ready to compete again. The players have the responsibility to make this an attractive club for the next manager, as well. Taken together, the potential trades that on the surface could seem like they render this Orioles season meaningless will be prologue to a stretch that’s anything but that.