Kyle Goon: Mike Elias just traded away the symbol of his own rebuild. Why should Orioles fans trust him anymore?

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Orioles to Red Sox.

We all know how the cycle goes.

In the last 30 years, Baltimore can draft all the great young talent it wants — even uncover a great player within — but eventually, by trade or by free agency, they all swim upstream to the big markets. Even if you suspected for a while that Adley Rutschman would leave this way, this painful baseball circle of life is rarely so humbling.

In this case, it also might break the spirit of this fan base.

I’m not sure how any fan of the Baltimore Orioles is supposed to watch the Mike Elias-led front office trade away its former top overall pick who came to represent all of the franchise’s lofty ambitions and feel like he should continue to steer the ship.

In eight trade deadlines, the Orioles have been sellers six times. We’ve reached a bleak point in which Elias is going back on his own work, dealing from his own first-round picks and acknowledging that this rebuild is taking a lot longer than anyone could have reasonably expected.

This trade deadline falls on the four-year anniversary of Elias announcing it would be “liftoff from here” for the Orioles. After an all-too-brief rise without a single playoff victory, the front office has acknowledged for the second year in a row that it could not build a competent team around its own hand-picked core by selling off key players.

Why should Orioles fans feel confident that this time, finally, Elias is about to get it right?

When Elias made Rutschman the No. 1 overall pick in 2019 — the first selection of his front office tenure — it was meant to be a cornerstone of a bright new era: “We are in a phase where we’re looking for building blocks,” Elias said. “And I think by signing Adley Rutschman today, we’ve found a very big piece.”

For about two years, Rutschman was exactly that. In the first 365 games after his debut, the Orioles were 197-131, nearly a 60% winning mark. Watching him play felt very much like the new dawn meeting our eyes after long, dark years of a painful rebuild.

After a year-and-a-half-long slump, Rutschman didn’t return to his 2023 peak this season, but he still was among the very best catchers in baseball, good enough to be the Orioles’ lone All-Star. Occasionally, when Baltimore played good baseball this year, Rutschman was a key part of it.

This trade is not an indictment of Rutschman. It’s an indictment of the 2026 Orioles roster, a collection of ill-fitting parts that has been overloaded at inflexible positions and sparse at more flexible ones.

The team has been perhaps the worst defense in baseball throughout all of it. It was only last week when Elias, taking some heat off of manager Craig Albernaz, acknowledged, “It’s me and my staff, I think we need to, you know, do a better job in that regard.”

It’s not that Elias and company can’t evaluate talent. He will always get dinged for not picking Bobby Witt Jr. over Rutschman, but Rutschman was still a three-time All-Star who had a lot to do with how well the Orioles have pitched over the last four seasons. It’s not that the Orioles can’t find value in smaller deals in the margins, pulling gold out of the air like Blaze Alexander or Yennier Cano. They do many things a front office is supposed to do well.

But only in two of these seasons has Elias proven he can construct a team that can even reach the playoff stage. In his tenure, the Orioles haven’t even proven they can win when they get there. And the sell-off at the deadline shows that they’ve failed again.

Winning is the bottom line. And even after the supposed moment of liftoff, Elias’s teams have faltered in crucial moments.

How many more opportunities should Elias and crew get to prove they’re not the ones to make Baltimore meaningfully competitive year after year? If owner David Rubenstein’s last public comments about Elias are anything to go by — “We’re really, really happy to have such a talented executive leading our baseball team,” he said — he’s got a lot more rope to keep trying to find the way out of the wilderness.

This ignores that Elias was one of the figures who led the franchise into this spot to begin with. Remember that as the Orioles tout the talent they got in return for all these trades — talent that may not help the big league club for seasons to come. He already played this game last year.

Undoubtedly, this trade brings into question how many dominos may continue to fall in the coming season. It seems clear that any Oriole without a long-term contract can be gotten by the competition. Scott Boras clients Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday may still be here for a while longer, but Baltimoreans can hear the clock ticking in their heads to the time when those guys will get traded. At the moment, it feels inevitable.

The rebuild has devolved into an endless churn of Not-Quite-Good-Enough. The 100-loss seasons are over, but the last four years have been a different kind of torture.

The next cycle is hoping players like Anthony Eyanson or Kyson Witherspoon or Enddy Azocar can be half as good as Rutschman was during the years we had him in Baltimore. Meanwhile, Rutschman has the chance to wear out the Orioles in division games for maybe the next year-and-a-half.

When Rutschman sat beside him at the dais in 2019, Elias promised that Rutschman would help “take this organization back to where it belongs.” The highest they ever got, though, was well shy of where they hoped to rise. “Liftoff” has been pushed back another year.

The trade isn’t necessarily the end of the pain: With Boston, Rutschman just multiplied his odds of going to a World Series, while the first Orioles championship since 1983 seems even further in the future than before.

It’s the end of an era for Elias and his staff, too. The next time he tries to sell the fans hope, the first person they’ll think of is the symbol of his first rebuild — the guy he just traded away.