So ends the most exciting trade deadline in years, and with it, the Orioles’ realistic shot at the AL East division title.

Perhaps that’s a bit presumptive. After all, there is a lot of baseball left to play, and there’s still time for both the Yankees and the Blue Jays to fall by the wayside, the Yankees especially — though they were a strong enough team going into the deadline that only adding Dustin Ackley and standing pat doesn’t represent any real huge wasted opportunity cost, especially given how much they like their top prospects.

(Discuss this post on the BSL boards here.)

The real concern is the Toronto Blue Jays, who added the best shortstop in baseball, a perennial ace pitcher, one of the best relievers in the majors this season in Mark Lowe and a guy the Orioles had been targeting as a starter — Ben Revere — as their 4th outfielder and/or part-time centerfielder with Kevin Pillar. Also, LaTroy Hawkins, who is still around. They ended up turning over 20% of their 25-man roster, improving in all five of those roster spots, and they already had the best run differential in the league.

The Orioles would have had to have made a great number of parallel moves to keep with the Jays, and didn’t — partially due to the relative weakness of the Baltimore farm system, partly because of the team’s aversion to bringing on additional contract obligations, and partly because there simply is no “parallel move” to the Jays getting the best position player and best pitcher on the market in Troy Tulowitzki and David Price. That is an expenditure of assets on the Jays’ part that cannot be responded to tit-for-tat by the Orioles, especially not within the franchise’s self-imposed means.

So Baltimore made two incremental moves and kept themselves in position for the unforeseeable future of the next few years. The big ticket item was the team’s acquisition of Gerardo Parra from the Milwaukee Brewers. Parra’s a 28-year old left-handed hitting corner outfielder who can fake a bit of center, has a career 99 OPS+, and is a free agent at the end of the season. Despite my limited expectations for Orioles pitching prospect Zach Davies — he’s had a shiny performance in AAA so far this year, but is a small guy with unremarkable stuff who continues to have the control issues that absolutely plague the Baltimore system — dealing him to the Brewers for Parra straight-up would be a remarkable overpay, if Parra weren’t having the season of his life.

Parra’s hitting .328/.369/.517 (.886 OPS) in 351 PA this year for Milwaukee with obvious power and no splits — for his career, he’s better against RHP than LHP by .170 points of OPS (.774 to .604), but that’s fairly usual. Of course, his career stats don’t matter — even his stats to date don’t matter — because all that’s important to the Orioles is the next 200 PA. If he hits like that over the next 200 PA and through the postseason, everything’s good. If he hits like Gerardo Parra, the deal’s a disaster. And when “the player performing to his career averages moving forward” defines failure in a trade, you’ve taken a remarkable and perhaps unacceptable risk.

All in all, the only reason Parra’s acquisition doesn’t bother me more is because I believe the organization is currently incapable of turning talented pitching prospects into anything more than power relievers like Britton. Davies doesn’t project to fill that mold at all, and so I’m fine with the Orioles capitalizing on his great 100 innings at AAA, which could very easily define the highest point of value Davies has in his career, as an Oriole prospect or otherwise. The last time the Orioles traded a #3-4 system prospect who wasn’t highly regarded nationally to the Brewers for a rental…well, when’s the last time Nicky Delmonico made you regret that trade?

Then, as the deadline hit, the Orioles acquired Junior Lake from the Chicago Cubs for Tommy Hunter. Again, this is a move that doesn’t bother me mainly because I don’t think the Orioles gave up much. In fact, clearing Hunter and Bud Norris off the roster (Norris was DFA’d after the Parra trade) gives the team a lot more flexibility with regards to Duquette’s beloved Norfolk shuttle. They should be able to move guys like Mychal Givens, Mike Wright, and TJ McFarland up and down at will for the rest of the year to keep the bullpen fresh. Junior Lake is an excuse to DFA David Lough, and one I expect the Orioles to take. The deal in and of itself is fine.

On the whole, though, what did the Orioles really do? They bet on a rental, but they didn’t bet big, and so they didn’t get the quality of rental they could have. The pitching staff remains wholly unaddressed, with the hopes that Ubaldo Jimenez can turn around his second-half swoon and that something finally clicks for Kevin Gausman having to stand in for any reasonable reinforcement. Getting to banish two of Lough, Chris Parmalee, and Travis Snider to the bench or waivers is nice, but the team fundamentally remains the same team as it was a couple weeks ago with a single, overperforming addition.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily; again, the Orioles couldn’t reasonably compete with the Jays here — they didn’t have enough capital, whether in actual dollars or in talent. So they didn’t. They took a gamble dealing a prospect who is probably playing the best baseball of his life, held onto their devalued top chips (Gausman, Bundy, and Harvey are all at the nadir of their value, most likely), and stood pat to see how the team they’ve put together plays out the string.

That’s fine. Win or lose, playoffs or not, that’s a respectable ethos. The Wild Card is a legitimate route to the World Series — ask Kansas City — and not being the favorite to win the division doesn’t mean you won’t. But if the Orioles don’t make the playoffs, that’ll make one thing crystal clear:

This offseason it’s time to finally make some moves and spend some money.

Jonathan Bernhardt
Jonathan Bernhardt

Jonathan is a contributing writer for VICE Sports. His work has previously appeared in Sports on Earth, Baseball Prospectus, The Classical, and ESPN’s SweetSpot Network. Born in central Maryland, Bernhardt currently lives in the New York metropolitan area.

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