Jon Meoli: Not many players singularly define an era of Orioles baseball. Trey Mancini did.

Already this year, the Orioles have welcomed back the mid-2010s contingent for Chris Davis’ club Hall of Fame induction, World Series winners from 1966 and Eddie Murray on the anniversary of his 500th home run. Last year, it was an anniversary celebration of Cal Ripken Jr.’s Iron Man streak and Adam Jones’ Orioles Hall of Fame induction.

It’s special for fans every time the beloved Orioles honored for these milestones come back to town to celebrate, with each occasion stirring memories from moments that are increasingly far off in the past.

That’s what makes this weekend uniquely poignant. It’s one Orioles fans shouldn’t want to miss. Trey Mancini’s ceremonial retirement as an Oriole gives the club and its supporters one more chance to recognize a player who isn’t tied to a tentpole achievement or phase of this franchise’s history.

In many ways, the only moments that stand out in Mancini’s time here are ones he provided. We’ve called them the rebuilding years for a while. Welcoming Mancini back this weekend has me thinking they’re more like the Trey Mancini years. He’s well worth celebrating, even if little else from that time was.

His September 2016 debut, marked with a home run and hysterical celebration from his family, meant he tasted a little bit of winning baseball. He was on the club when it clinched a playoff spot on the last day of the season, was in the clubhouse for the Champagne celebration and Tommy Hunter’s affectionately profane toast of Kevin Gausman, and was rostered in the wild-card game.

Mancini’s first full season, 2017, was one that ended disappointingly for the Orioles, and his worst year in Baltimore happened to be the franchise’s worst — 2018 — when they lost 115 games, traded all their stars away and then cleaned house in the front office, ushering in the rebuild under Mike Elias and Brandon Hyde.

Mancini was the main attraction of the 2019 team, and I’ll admit I forgot just how good he was for that very bad ballclub. His .899 OPS that year remains the highest of any qualifying Oriole in the last decade, and while John Means was a deserving All-Star that year, I remember the shock of the day Mancini was left off the roster. No one around the Orioles could understand it.

That pales in comparison to the shock of learning of his colon cancer diagnosis the following spring. That rocked both the club and its fans. He remained the star attraction going into that 2020 season, and while it ended up being a 60-game season due to the pandemic, it was one in which Mancini’s absence was palpable.

Late in that season, I was waiting at a red light on Pratt Street on my way to the ultrasound that would give my wife and I our best glimpse yet of our first child. Mancini and his now-wife, Sara, were stopped next to me, heading to one of his final scans before his treatment was finished. We rolled the windows down to say hello, celebrated each other’s milestones, then drove away.

I still remember how excited they were to be nearing the finish line of that incredible challenge and how it felt like their excitement for my family was just as sincere. Not everyone in that clubhouse is like that, then or now.

And that’s what made his return meaningful for the Orioles. The 2019 and 2020 Orioles were largely a transient bunch. Off the junk pile they came and, eventually, back to the junk pile they went.

The pitching staff was mostly infuriating. You couldn’t sneak a bad infielder through waivers without the Orioles claiming him, and once he got here, you longed for the last bad infielder whose place he took. But in 2021, at least, there was Mancini again, close enough to his old self that you’d never know what he went through just by watching him play.

By that point, to be fair, the sprouts of some good Orioles teams were starting to pop up. Cedric Mullins, Anthony Santander, Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle all featured on that team with Mancini, and by 2022 there was a feeling it was time for this team to turn things around.

It did that around mid-May when Adley Rutschman made his debut. But, with the team hovering around .500 and well out of a playoff spot, Mancini — months away from free agency — was dealt to the Houston Astros in a three-team trade that brought pitchers Chayce McDermott and Seth Johnson to the Orioles.

Mancini won a World Series ring out of the deal with Houston but missed the revival he’d waited for here. The 2023 Orioles won 101 games and the AL East, the first of two straight playoff appearances, and a mixture of those new stars such as Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson plus the “rebuild survivors,” Hays, Mullins and Santander, will be remembered as part of those special teams for a long time.

I imagine at some point those teams will come back here to be honored, be it as a group or when one of them is elected into the Orioles Hall of Fame. I bet they’ll have to set up more chairs than ever when Hyde gets his moment.

But Mancini really defined the era between the two defining eras of the last 15 years here — the Buck Showalter peak and the Hyde Peak — and the opportunities to celebrate that aren’t going to be frequent. I can’t wait to see which former teammates come to town, mostly because I fondly remember those clubhouses as full of guys who couldn’t hide how glad they were to be in the big leagues and those who were so serious in their efforts to prove they belonged it was almost endearing.

Mancini never lost either quality, and it made him a star on a team that otherwise had none. I’m not really one for these celebrations at the ballpark; “back in my day” doesn’t apply when it wasn’t my day.

But I’m bringing my kids Saturday. Their dad — a very serious journalist — doesn’t clap at Orioles games like everyone else, and I think my daughter has noticed. This is worth making an exception.