Given my avoidant attachment style, it should come as no surprise that my plan for dealing with all that the next week-plus of Orioles will bring — the inevitable trades, the revisiting of every aspect of their collapse over the last year, the callbacks to the bad old days — was to just let it come naturally.

If we’re going to end up at this place anyway, why rush things?

Well, turns out the sound I heard whistling down the tracks was, in fact, a train. The Orioles’ four-game losing streak on either side of the All-Star break pretty much entrenched them as sellers. So let’s reckon with this now.

Pending free agents who will leave for nothing after the season (except in some cases a draft pick for those who receive and reject the qualifying offer) aren’t worth a lot to a team playing out the string, and any chance to add value beyond this year is worth pursuing. Trading them is unequivocally the right move.

It’s just that we were not supposed to be here. Not this year. Not at this point in the process.

Go click through any of the stories from when Mike Elias traded Andrew Cashner, Dylan Bundy, Jonathan Villar, Alex Cobb, Jorge Lopez, or Trey Mancini back before the Orioles finally got good. You’ll see plenty of references to making prudent decisions with soon-to-depart players. Back then, all of the things that felt bad in the moment — losing with regularity and trading away well-liked and productive players, mostly — were presented under the guise of a pain that would ultimately contribute to a long-term winner and prevent a return to those days.

Yet here we are, and in facing all those unpleasant developments all over again, the comparisons are inevitable. I always get stuck on a pair of differences between then and now so significant they render the argument silly. But before I explain what I mean, it felt relevant to share something I dug up from one of my earliest interviews with Mike Elias as this project was kicking off ahead of the 2019 season.

“Our goal is not to cobble together a one-year wonder team that has a chance at making the playoffs, but if things go wrong, we’ll have to break it down,” Elias told me back in 2019. “We want to do this right. We need a sustainable pipeline of talent that starts in the amateur world and extends all the way up here to the major league level. We need to do the things necessary to build that pipeline.”

He was talking about the long-term plan following a year in which the Orioles were historically bad, traded all of their good players, and cleaned house in baseball operations to bring him in to execute his plans. It feels pretty clear to me that the Orioles have executed that portion of their plan, and for all the reasons this year has gone badly (injuries and bad luck chief among them), it’s not at the point where they’re breaking the whole thing down and abandoning that original plan.

But the way this played out — a couple of playoff appearances and then a return to selling — was absolutely not what was promised. I don’t blame anyone for feeling like that makes this worse than all those years when losing was expected.

That’s the first main difference for me, though: Trading a bunch of pending free agents isn’t the end of anything other than this season’s chances of winning something. That’s a tough thing to face given where expectations were coming into the season, but pretty much every reason anyone was bullish on this year’s club will be intact come next March, and maybe strengthened by a better offseason, to say nothing of what the Orioles can gain in these upcoming trades.

The second difference is that there’s still more worth caring about on the team itself. Most Orioles games after the trade deadline will still feature some combination of Jackson Holliday, Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Westburg, Adley Rutschman, and Colton Cowser making up over half their lineup, and we’ll probably see a lot more Coby Mayo at that point as well. The short-term stopgap pitchers who were so frustrating will be gone and we’ll at least get to see what the team has internally on that front. Maybe there’s some opportunity for a Samuel Basallo or Dylan Beavers to move up in August or September.

There’s just a much higher floor for this team on the field, and much more reason to care about it even if the playoffs are out of reach.

All that probably feels meaningless in terms of distinctions at this point. I get it. I’m not really interested in being back to this point, either. As long as it’s temporary, I can live with it.

On the pod

Paul and I talked trades on this week’s podcast, but not without another dive into the Fast franchise and more specifically, why the Banner Baseball Show is kind of like a Fast movie itself. You’ll have to just roll with me on this one.

Ballpark chatter

“He’s been a catalyst for us all year. He’s just been so good. He plays with a lot of passion, a lot of energy. That’s been him all year.” — interim manager Tony Mansolino on Ramón Laureano.

All true, and honestly, surprisingly so. The lack of impact Tyler O’Neill has made is mitigated by the fact that Laureano has been awesome, and given he has a $6 million club option for 2026, he’s a unique case at this deadline. He can absolutely help next year’s team and means they’ll have one less offseason need. But you can probably get really good value for what he can add to a contender — another fun conundrum for the Orioles to figure out in the next nine days.

By the numbers

.849

Gunnar Henderson should be mostly blameless for how this season has gone, at least in my mind, and his .849 OPS since May 1 is a lot of the reason why. Considering he didn’t have a full spring training and came off the injured list to face a steady diet of the game’s nastiest lefties for a month, the fact he’s recovered to be that consistent is nothing to feel bad about. There could be more power, of course, and I’m sure that’s going to come in bunches when it does. But I just feel compelled to point out that the Orioles’ star 24-year-old shortstop is still a star.

Talent pipeline

Outfielder Thomas Sosa was one of my breakout picks for Baseball America this year. He missed most of the first half due to injury but is hitting well now that he’s healthy at High-A Aberdeen. He has an .800 OPS with three home runs in 66 plate appearances. His 90th-percentile exit velocity of 107 mph last year was enough to make me take notice, and he’s making enough contact that it’s showing up in games. That feels promising.

For further reading

🧡 Honoring his grandmother’s memory: I’d been looking forward to reading this story for a while, and Danielle told it well. Luis Vázquez isn’t a main character on this Orioles team, but that doesn’t take away from his journey here and how much it means to those around him.

⭐ Machado, still shining: It feels crazy that it’s been seven years since Manny Machado was dealt. He has continued to be a great player in his own way, as Andy wrote from the All-Star Game.

😞 This one hurts: This Grayson Rodriguez update from last week was just such a bummer. It’s at a different stage of his career, but the parallels to Dylan Bundy and Hunter Harvey just feel too real at this point. And people wanted the Orioles to add a first-round pitcher to this mix?

🎌 A very Japanese tribute: Designer manhole covers. Who knew? This was a fun story as well.

🌼 A secret garden?! Camden Yards has a special garden that’s designed to attract the Baltimore oriole and other pollinators. Who knew?!