When July trade deadline day arrived for the Orioles last year, the big ones were already out of the way. Manny Machado and Zack Britton, two of the O’s biggest pending free agents, were dealt earlier in the month. Those were the obvious ones to trade to kick off a move into a rebuilding phase.
Still unknown was how much the Orioles would be looking to trade players who had years of team control remaining beyond 2018. Would the Dan Duquette-led Orioles embrace that this was going to be a multi-year rebuilding plan, or would the team veer into a probably-misguided idea that things could be quickly fixed?