Yankees Rival in Trade Deadline No-Man's Land

Will the real Baltimore Orioles please step forward? Entering the 2025 season, many pundits predicted the Orioles would be playoff contenders. But Sunday's 5-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rays didn't change Baltimore's postseason positioning. The Orioles (36-47) remain in last place in the American League East and seven games back in the AL Wild Card standings.

So will Baltimore buy or sell ahead of the July 31 MLB trade deadline? Orioles general manager Mike Elias said it's just too soon to tell.

“We’re still fighting and playing for 2025,” Elias told MLB.com Saturday. “This is a team that we had high hopes for. We can see the talent on the team, but [we] just stumbled badly out of the gates and dug a hole, and that’s still haunting us. I think we’re playing better and things are moving in the right direction, but there is a deadline coming up, and we’re going to have to make a strategic decision around that sometime [within the next] month.

“I don’t have an exact day in mind, but we’ll use our tools and judgment to decide when that might be," Elias continued. "But for now, we’re hoping to keep playing well, keep racking up wins, staying within an arm's reach of the Wild Card race in the meantime, but we will have to make a reasonable determination at some point in the next several weeks.”

This wait-and-see approach is confounding baseball insiders. “The Baltimore Orioles have scouts and executives scratching their heads wondering what they’ll do at the trade deadline,” USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported Sunday. “They were nearly no-hit three times in five days, and then after losing 6-0, came back and scored 22 runs against the Rays."

Should the Orioles go into sell-mode, they potentially hold one of the most highly-sought arms on the market.

“Just when it looked like Orioles starter Charlie Morton’s career may be over at the age of 41, he is yielding a 2.90 ERA in his last six starts and could be a valuable trade chip if the Orioles are out of the race,” Nightengale reported.

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported Friday that Morton “is emerging as a legitimate trade candidate.”

“The biggest concern for a team interested in acquiring Morton might be paying the balance of his $15 million salary,” Rosenthal wrote. “At the deadline, he still would be owed nearly $5 million.”

So the clock is ticking for Elias. “I don’t think we can wait until the very last day or two,” he said, per MLB.com. “I think we need to have time to work on deals, and you don’t want to see the market activate too much, whether you’re buying or selling. I think it’s sooner than that.”

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