Orioles' controversial trade deadline sets up a make-or-break offseason for current core and front office

The Baltimore Orioles trading Adley Rutschman was a stunning admission of failure from a front office that has spent the last eight years trying to convince everyone that they were the smartest people in the sport. As much as the trade hurts, the admission of failure is a good thing. If Mike Elias and his front office are not going to be fired for screwing up their rebuild and wasting eight years, then the next best thing is for them to admit they failed and try something else.

When asked by the Baltimore Banner's Kyle Goon about why Orioles fans should trust him to lead the team going forward, Mike Elias admitted that he got caught up in the narrative of how great the Orioles rebuild was. Trading Adley Rutschman officially ends that narrative, and now all the front office is left with is the question: How do we build a competitive baseball team with the pieces that we have left?

This upcoming offseason has the potential to catapult the Orioles forward or sink them

Now that the Orioles front office is free of the self-imposed expectation that they are going to prove their genius by drafting their way to the World Series, it opens up a world of opportunities as to how they shape the team going forward. For the past few years, the Orioles' young core of first-round picks and top prospects were "off limits" in trades. If the front office can move Adley Rutschman, nobody else is off limits.

There are a few players that, based on their contracts and their performance, are going to be around. Pete Alonso and Samuel Basallo on the position player side are locks to be on the team next year, and in the rotation, Kyle Bradish and Shane Baz have been extended. Those are really the only players that should be guaranteed to be on the 2027 roster. The only other name worth including is Gunnar Henderson, who has flashed MVP talent, and trading him after a sub-.700 OPS season would be selling ludicrously low.

That doesn't mean the other 35 guys on the 40-man roster will/should be traded, but if Rutschman can be dealt, why should anyone not on a long-term contract be safe?

The Orioles cannot go into next season thinking, "We just need Jackson Holliday, Dylan Beavers, Colton Cowser, and Coby Mayo to take a step forward, and Jordan Westburg and Felix Bautista to stay healthy, and we'll be fine." That's too many ifs! That's too many hypothetical players! That's the kind of thinking that's gotten them into this mess.

Free agents are expensive, and trades can be costly, so it won't be possible for the Orioles to replace all of their hypothetical players, but the team has reached a point where bringing back the same core of underperforming top prospects is not acceptable. They have to mix it up; some of these guys have to go even if the Orioles don't get maximum value the way they did for Rutschman, and they need to be replaced by proven commodities.

This is an even more important conversation on the pitching side of things. In the wake of the Rutschman trade, the Orioles farm system is once again one of the best in baseball. The difference between now and the last time the Orioles had a top system is that this time the strength of the Orioles system is pitching. For the first time in the Mike Elias era, the Orioles have a surplus of good to great pitching prospects in the upper minors.

The real test of whether or not the Orioles front office learned their lesson from their last failed rebuild is whether or not they are willing to trade some of these prospect arms. The mistake the Orioles made last time was expecting all of their prospects to hit and refusing to trade any of them even though they had more than could ever fit on a roster. Now that the Orioles have way more good pitching prospects than could ever fit in a rotation, they need to self-scout which ones they are going to hold onto and make part of their rotation, which ones are bound for the bullpen, and which ones they can afford to trade for win-now talent.

This is not a decision that the Orioles can afford to just sit back and hope plays out. Here are all of the arms in the upper minors that are eligible to be taken away from them in the Rule 5 draft this winter.

Michael Forret
Luis De Leon
Nestor German
Levi Wells
Juaron Watt-Brown
Braxton Bragg
Zach Fruit
Patrick Reilly

That's a large group of good minor league pitchers that the Orioles are at risk of losing for nothing if they don't decide to add them to the 40-man roster or trade them before the Rule 5 Draft. It doesn't even include most of the Orioles' best pitching prospects: Anthony Eyanson, Joseph Dzierwa, and Caden Hunter, all of whom are pushing for an early 2027 MLB debut.

The saying that you can never have too much pitching is true most of the time, but the Orioles cannot fit 11+ rookie starting pitchers on their 40-man roster next season. Some of these guys have to be moved.

Between the former top prospect position players that need to be traded and the current top prospect pitching prospects that the Orioles have to make a decision on, it should be a busy and active winter for the Orioles front office. If they have learned from their mistakes and are now willing to dedicate their efforts toward building a winning team rather than proving how smart they are, then they have the pieces to build a good team on top of the foundation they've established.

If they once again get caught up in the narrative of how great their farm system is and end up holding onto all these players that can't possibly fit together, then this time next year the fanbase will be reacting to an inevitable Gunnar Henderson trade.

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