One missed opportunity from last offseason, the Orioles regret not taking advantage of more than the rest

Last offseason was the most aggressive offseason the Baltimore Orioles have had since Mike Elias took over as the General Manager in 2018. They handed out a nine-figure contract to one of the premier free agents in the market and moved a large package of prospects for a starting pitcher. Yet after all that, this Orioles team is still very flawed.

When a team is underperforming, it's easy to look back at the offseason and point to dozens of different things the team could have done differently to avoid the trouble that they are in. With the Orioles, though, there are a couple of things that were right in front of them that they could have done to improve the team that stand out above the rest.

The Orioles chose not to trade from their logjam at the first base position last offseason, that looks like a mistake now

After the initial shock and excitement of the Pete Alonso signing wore off, everyone had a similar question on their mind. What are the Orioles going to do with Ryan Mountcastle and Coby Mayo? Alonso is one of the few players in the league who expect to play every day, and in his career in New York, he played a shocking small amount as a DH. He's there to play first base every day; with that being the case, it was obvious there wasn't much room for Mayo and Mountcastle at that position anymore. The obvious conclusion was that they would have to be traded.

With how they had both played in 2025, neither Mayo nor Mountcastle was at their peak trade value. Mayo, as the younger player who caught fire in the month of September, had the potential to be part of a trade package for some sort of impact player, though, and Mountcastle had a strong enough track record that someone would have bought low on him and given the Orioles something for him, especially once the Orioles signed him to a deal with a team option.

Could Mayo have headlined a trade for Edward Cabrera? Could Mountcastle have brought back an interesting triple-A reliever from a team that needed a right-handed platoon bat?

Only the Orioles front office knows what offers they turned down for their two extra first basemen. Whatever those offers were, the Orioles weren't impressed and decided that rather than trade Mayo and Mountcastle for whatever they could get for them, they'd rather ride it out with three right-handed first basemen on the roster and see what happens. Now, just a month into the season, it's clear that was the wrong decision.

When Jordan Westburg went down, some people acted like the Orioles were vindicated for not trading Mayo. That never made any sense, as Mayo had proven over the course of his career in the minors and in the majors that he was not a third baseman.

It was kind of like if you had a friend who ordered some tires for his dirt bike, and when they got there, they turned out to be road bike tires. You tell him to trade the road bike tires in for a bike part that will actually be useful to him, but he doesn't like what the part store is offering him for a trade-in so he just keeps the road bike tires in case he needs them even though he just bought the most expensive road bike tires on the market last month and those things are going to last for at least five years.

Then, when he gets a flat on his dirt bike, he says, "Aren't I lucky I didn't get rid of these tires?!" and then he just goes ahead and puts the road bike tires on the dirt bike and tries to hit the trail. When he inevitably crashes that bike, it's not the tire's fault. He tried to make them do something they weren't supposed to be doing, and now nobody is going to trade him anything for those road bike tires he messed up.

Even if the Orioles couldn't get exactly what they wanted for Mayo and Mountcastle, they should have traded them both to the highest bidder for whatever could help the team the most and then moved on to building the best roster possible once the first base logjam freed up more roster spots for more versatile players.

Now that they've kept both of them, they're likely going to end up trading Mayo for pennies on the dollar and cutting bait with Mountcastle for nothing. They took a chicken salad and turned it into chicken... something. It's hard to look at where they are right now in the standings and not think about where they might be if Mayo and Mountcastle had been turned into something useful for this team.

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