The Orioles trading Trey Mancini was hard enough. Talking about it the same way as the three years of rebuilding trades doesn't help.

Everything about the Orioles changed this year except for the way we talk about them trading major leaguers for future value, which does a particular disservice when it's Trey Mancini is concerned.

I think it was after the arbitration deadline in 2020, when Mike Elias non-tendered Hanser Alberto and traded away Jose Iglesias on the same day, that I resolved no longer to traffic in the “This is a rebuild” explanations for such moves.

The Orioles, of course, were in a rebuild at the time, but that didn’t make what they were doing OK. They were in stage where anyone making above the league minimum was liable to be traded or simply let go, and nine times out of 10 that’s what happened to them. The product suffered for all of them. 

Mike Elias referred to all those unpopular moves of yore Monday after he traded Trey Mancini to the Houston Astros for a pair of high-upside pitching prospects when he referred to “a lot of difficult decisions that have enabled us to make progress and continue us to make progress toward the competition and rivalries that we ultimately have with the Blue Jays, Rays, the Red Sox and the Yankees. And difficult decisions are going to continue to be part of that.”

Here’s the thing. Elias and the Orioles have spent so long putting everything they’ve done, from the first moves of non-tendering Tim Beckham and Caleb Joseph to this week’s Mancini trade and whatever happens tomorrow, into the same barrel of helping the organization long-term. It’s doing him, the fans, and the Orioles at large a disservice. And it’s time someone started making that distinction, because when something like this happens that could actually do that, it’s obscured by the moves that didn’t help at all.