Usually, with a baseball trade, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get fleeced when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, considering that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a starter for three years in Tampa Bay, then got traded again, and is still under team control in Milwaukee? Always in motion, said the great philosopher, is the future.
Usually.
Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade worked out for your team. So say the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their big deadline acquisition, left-hander Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The 2021 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up made four starts for Baltimore, totaling 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, as well as an opponent batting line of .338/.404/.514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not ideal.
Philosophically, I get what the Orioles were trying to do.
As a side effect of being the laughingstock of baseball for most of the late 2010s, Baltimore amassed a collection of prospects unmatched in the entire league. Some of those prospects turned into Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Grayson Rodriguez… the kind of core that could produce multiple MVPs if everything goes right, and form the foundation of a regular World Series contender.
It also produced a lot of prospects who fell into the 11 to 30 range on the organizational ranking: Future big leaguers, in many cases, but with future value grades of about 40, rather than the 55s and 60s you want to build your team around. At this deadline, the Orioles tried to cash in on players from this tier of their prospect list, as well as players who had been on this tier of the prospect list three or four seasons ago and have just become 40-grade big leaguers, full stop. Being limited to a 26-man active roster, there simply wasn’t room for all of them.
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