Orioles stance on Trey Mancini trade rumors isn’t comforting

The Baltimore Orioles are on fire. Now just a few games back of an AL Wild Card spot, Mike Elias remains open to trade deadline suggestions.

Those suggestions are unlikely to change anything in terms of Trey Mancini’s market.

Mancini is prepared for the worst, and the Orioles seem willing to give him just that. But are the O’s a flash in the pan, or THE story of the baseball season? If Elias has his way and deals Mancini, then perhaps it will be the latter.

“I’m at peace with whatever happens,” Mancini said, per The Baltimore Sun. “I just have been so proud of this team and the way that we have bounced back from some tough years, and seeing a lot of guys come into their own, become really good major league players, it’s been awesome.”

That sounds like a man who knows his fate.

Should Orioles still trade Trey Mancini?

Mancini is the exact kind of player Baltimore would hope to acquire in its rebuild. If he arrived a few years ahead of schedule, who cares?

The 30-year-old won’t be a free agent until the end of the 2023 season. If the Orioles want to maximize his value, trading him with time left on his contract makes the most sense. Of course, most assumed the O’s would be well out of contention by now. That has not been the case.

“In this job, everything that I do or that we do has tradeoffs,” Elias said. “And all I can say is we do everything from a very global, very thoughtful perspective about what is the right thing to do for the health of the Orioles franchise, and all that’s being taken into consideration for the draft, but also for the trade deadline coming up, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That’s the front office version of a non-answer, and a non-answer at this point in the process is not what O’s fans want to hear. If Baltimore keeps winning, it will have a tough time shipping off its top talent with a straight face to prolong a rebuild that’s already past its supposed expiration date.

Keeping Mancini — especially considering they already have a stacked farm system and the No. 1 overall pick on the way — is the right decision if they believe in this core.