Earlier this week, I asked Orioles fans to think about what will end up happening between now and the trade deadline.<\/p>\n
That the team will have to sell off players seems inevitable, since they are currently 28-40, 7.5 games back of a wild card spot with seven teams to pass.<\/p>\n
The games back doesn\u2019t seem completely insurmountable if they were able to rip off a month of substantially good baseball, but it\u2019s a lot of teams to pass.<\/p>\n
The question of who exactly might get traded away depends on a variety of things that will play out between now and the end of July trade deadline. It seems safe to say that anyone who is set to become a free agent after this season ends will have the front office exploring deals.<\/p>\n
A player who we\u2019re now assuming will be dealt could end up getting hurt. Performance could slip such that Mike Elias no longer feels like he is getting a return to make it worth dealing somebody.<\/p>\n
Or, the other way around, someone like Cedric Mullins or Zach Eflin could be performing so well that the value of getting a draft pick for extending a qualifying offer is greater than what teams are offering.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how the survey results came in:<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s a plurality expecting four or more players to be dealt away, with 78% thinking at least three will be traded. It\u2019s grim to dwell on it for long.<\/p>\n That\u2019s going to be Orioles who we\u2019ve gotten to know and like for multiple seasons, traded away in the midst of a season that we had high hopes at the beginning and it\u2019s turned out like this.<\/p>\n Cedric Mullins, in particular, deserves better than to have ended up in this situation, but the team\u2019s situation is what it is anyway.<\/p>\n If Elias gets wild, he might even decide to trade somebody with 2026 team control as well, depending on what prospects he expects to make it up out of the farm system, or if he thinks he might be selling high on a player who he does not expect to be doing as well next season.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what happened when Elias did a little trading away from what felt like a surging Orioles team in 2022.<\/p>\n Dealing Jorge L\u00f3pez and Trey Mancini felt bad at the time, but both fell off hard after the trade.<\/p>\n I\u2019m in the four or more crowd. Mullins and Ryan O\u2019Hearn among the position players, probably Zach Eflin, then maybe also a reliever. That\u2019s who I think will get dealt as things stand right now. There could turn out to be cases for another starter like Tomoyuki Sugano, or someone who had been signed as a bench player like Ram\u00f3n Laureano.<\/p>\n There are 40 games left between now and the trade deadline.<\/p>\n The picture could change one way or another for each of these individual players. Unless the Orioles rip off a 10+ game winning streak to close the gap in one two-week burst, the team\u2019s outlook for 2025 probably will not change, which is what makes the sell-off almost certain. How big of a sell-off is what we\u2019ll discover next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this week, I asked Orioles fans to think about what will end up happening between now and the trade deadline. That the team will have to… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":61728,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mlb"],"yoast_head":"\n