Can I Interest You in a Lightly Used Oriole?

Over the past month, every red-blooded American with a phone and a passing familiarity with baseball has posted some version of the following sentiment: This crop of trade candidates stinks. It’s true.

Somewhat conveniently for the purposes of my argument, Ben Clemens wrapped up his annual Trade Value series this morning. He has 50 players on his rankings proper, plus 65 more in the Honorable Mentions post. I’ve seen persistent, at least semi-credible trade rumors about one player on the top 50: Byron Buxton. Buxton is one of the most talented baseball players who ever lived, but his injuries and maddening inconsistency have become his reputation. This is reflected not only in his incredibly incentive-laden Twins contract, but his spot on the trade value list: no. 41.

More to the point, Buxton recently declared that he has no interest whatsoever in waiving his full no-trade clause to allow a move to a contender. His exact words: “I don’t want to play anywhere else.” It doesn’t get more unequivocal than that.

Even after widening the parameters to include the 65 honorable mentions, trade rumors don’t get much more dense. I counted four more: Steven Kwan, Joe Ryan, Sandy Alcantara, and Luis Robert Jr., who doesn’t really count because he’s in a section marked “Departing the List, Not an Honorable Mention.”

OK, then. Well, if 15 or 20 teams are looking to reload for a playoff push, but the most desirable 10% of the major league population isn’t available, that will dampen everyone’s enthusiasm some.

Why is this the case? Dozens of reasons, but I want to zero in on one right now: The teams that are selling at the deadline are bad. The teams that are buying at the deadline want good players. Bad teams don’t have good players. If they did, they wouldn’t be bad teams.

Especially teams like the White Sox, Rockies and Nationals, which have been bad for ages. They sold off all their good players years ago, and got worse in the process. Well, not all their good players in Washington’s case, as the fruits of their rebuild have started to come through to the majors. But I don’t think they’re shopping James Wood at this deadline.

Other bad teams have good players, or at least talented players, locked up to long-term deals that make them inconvenient to trade. The A’s recently gave the “Josh Johnson Memorial Please Don’t File A Grievance, MLBPA” extension to both Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler, both of whom would otherwise be highly sought-after power bats.

In an alternate universe, Bryan Reynolds is a top rental bat. Instead, he signed a $100 million contract that makes him a Pirate for life, a prospect that seems to excite him now about as much as five more years of doing laundry.

These days, it takes an uncommon confluence of talent and dashed expectations to get attractive players on the market. And even then, the contract situation has to be right. The Diamondbacks are selling; any doubt on that score evaporated when they shipped Josh Naylor to Seattle on Thursday night. But the Braves, who are just as cooked in 2025 but lighter on players who are close to free agency, figure to stand pat.

The Orioles have no such limitations. They make the Diamondbacks look downright sentimental. I mention this every time I write about them, most recently in this article from April about Cedric Mullins, but the O’s are allergic to long-term make-good contracts. They have only one major leaguer, Tyler O’Neill, tied down to a guaranteed contract beyond this season. Nine Orioles big leaguers will be free agents at the end of this campaign; eight others will have their last year of team control in 2026, either via arbitration or a club option.

And they’re glued to last place in the AL East. As of this writing, the Orioles are as far behind fourth-place Tampa Bay as the Rays are behind the first-place Blue Jays. Baltimore’s chances of even making the Wild Card round stand at 0.6%.

So this is a bad team, sure, but with plenty of talent. While the White Sox and Pirates have spent more time on the bottom than an anxious catfish, the Orioles — with this core — won 91 games in 2024 and 101 in 2023. In fact, they’re a game over .500 since firing manager Brandon Hyde in mid-May. They have good players.

Knowing that GMs talk to everyone about everyone, I’m sure somebody has phoned up Mike Elias and said, “What up, bro, it sure looks like you guys broke Adley Rutschman. How about we take him off your hands and clear room for Samuel Basallo?” The baseball equivalent of calling a stranger and asking if their refrigerator is running; presumably Elias would say no.

But here are 18 trade candidates: Félix Bautista, who’s appeared in six MLB Trade Rumors articles over the past month, plus the 17 big leaguers who will be free agents either this year or next. Is there a big-ticket trade candidate in there?

Bautista’s injury is new; he just went on the IL with shoulder discomfort on Thursday. If he were healthy, he would’ve been a major potential trade chip. The 6-foot-8 fireballer was in the midst of one of the best relief seasons of the decade when he came down with a torn UCL in 2023, and he’s under team control for not one but two seasons beyond this one.

Rental relievers might be fungible, but relievers who strike out almost half of their opponents and have team control on their clocks — those guys are valuable. Given that this IL stint will keep Bautista out of action through the first week of August at an absolute minimum, however, it all but certainly erases whatever chance he had of getting traded.

And, in my opinion, it prevented some team from making a major mistake. Long-term team control for relievers is one of baseball’s most overrated trade commodities, because relief pitchers — even great ones — are unpredictable year to year. Even relievers who look unhittable during the regular season can torpedo their team’s postseason with one or two bad outings. (Don’t believe me? Ask Emmanuel Clase or Jeff Hoffman how their 2024 playoff campaigns went.)

Bautista’s ERA this year is an impressive 2.60, but compared to his 2023 campaign, his fastball velocity is down two ticks. His strikeout rate has dropped from 46.4% to 35.2%, and his walk rate has soared from 11.0% to 16.2%. That’s literally the highest walk rate of any qualified reliever in baseball. And he’s 30 years old, now coming off a major injury to his elbow and a minor one to his shoulder. Bautista is a good reliever even with all that baggage, but I wouldn’t trade a top prospect for a pitcher who’s clearly trending in the wrong direction.

Many of the other players in this chart are also carrying at least yellow flags. The top free agent-to-be in Baltimore’s bullpen, Domínguez, has the third-highest walk rate in the league. Mullins is having about an average year in the bat overall, but he’s being floated by the monster start that inspired me to write about him in April. Since that article ran, Mullins is hitting .185/.236/.329.

Mountcastle is just now starting a rehab assignment for the hamstring injury that landed him on the 60-day IL. Perhaps that hamstring explains why this one-time line drive machine has a wRC+ of 74. Even teams that need a first baseman or DH have better options.

Eflin, one of Baltimore’s big pickups at last year’s deadline, just spent a month on the IL with a back injury. The good news: He threw 84 pitches and allowed just two runs in five innings in a close loss to Cleveland. The bad news: That’s the first time in four starts in which Eflin didn’t allow 1) at least one home run and 2) more earned runs than innings pitched.

The scarcity of good pitching probably means someone will talk themselves into Eflin. And with his back issues, um, behind him, maybe that will work out. Eflin’s certainly done some good work in the postseason over the past few years.

The same is true with Morton, who’s having the inverse of Mullins’ season. He was having an awful year, then I wrote about him a few weeks into the season, and he’s fixed. On May 9, I published an article declaring the 41-year-old to be cooked. He’d allowed an ERA that could nearly be counted in dozens, and lost seven of his first nine starts.

Morton was stumped as to what had gone wrong, and so was I, to be honest. Turns out: Nothing was wrong. Since that article ran, he’s made 13 appearances (10 starts), covering 63 2/3 innings; over that time, he’s 6-1 with a 3.53 ERA. Actually, Morton’s been a little dinger-prone this past week, allowing four homers in his previous two starts. Lop those off and you have a 2.61 ERA and 2.80 FIP over 51 2/3 innings from May 10 to July 10.

Another frequent editorial subject of mine is Trevor Rogers, whom the Orioles acquired a year ago at what turned out to be an immense cost: Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers, who’s become a breakout star since moving to Miami.

But as bad as Rogers was last year, he’s currently rocking a 1.74 ERA in seven starts this year. Now, that 1.74 ERA has more fluke markers than I can count. Among them: a .200 BABIP, a strand rate 15 points higher than last year’s, a HR/FB ratio half last year’s, a K% of just 21.9%, and a FIP that’s nearly double his ERA.

But that highly regressible FIP is still only 2.97. And Rogers has recovered two miles an hour of fastball velocity, started throwing a sweeper, and de-emphasized his sinker. He’s made real changes, and as a result he (among other things) is running the highest groundball rate of his career by a significant margin.

The Orioles gave up Stowers for a shot at fixing Rogers; since he has a rock-bottom salary ($2.6 million) and another year of team control beyond this one, maybe some other team will pay through the nose to get another handful of starts out of him down the stretch, then a full year of production in 2026.

Or the Orioles could keep Rogers. I’d be surprised, however, if they keep O’Hearn.

O’Hearn, the Orioles’ only All-Star this season, is a legitimate impact hitter. He doesn’t have ideal DH power, but his .375 OBP is among the top 20 in the league. He’s also cut down his strikeouts from his time in Kansas City, and his breakout year in Baltimore. If there’s no Juan Soto or Manny Machado on the market this year, a guy with O’Hearn’s OBP skills, with a strikeout rate of 16.4%, could remake an ailing lineup.

There are, as with every Orioles trade candidate, drawbacks. He’s a rental. He’s a DH. He turns 32 this weekend, which doesn’t matter that much (like I said, he’s a rental DH) but does limit the chances of a team re-signing him to anchor the lineup for the next five years. And he’s a platoon player.

O’Hearn is the beau ideal of a platoon player, since he hits right-handed pitching better than left-handed pitching. And by “hits better,” I mean he absolutely crushes righties, with a wRC+ of 145. Against lefties, however, his wRC+ is only 77. That takes him out of the lineup about a third of the time, and presents a tactical liability that can be hidden on the aggregate but begs to be exposed by a seventh-inning pitching change in a playoff game.

Good, but flawed. Just like Morton, Rogers, and Eflin. Just like the Orioles in general.