Jon Meoli: The narrative of the Orioles’ rebuild changed with the trade deadline. It didn’t have to.

I’ve heard it from him so many times I can probably recite it from memory: the origin of Mike Elias’ time with the Orioles and how dire the landscape across the organization was to him when he arrived from Houston in 2018.

I lived it all, telling hundreds of stories about the people and processes working to change that.

So, when he added a chapter to it Tuesday by defending his job after trading franchise cornerstone Adley Rutschman as part of a second straight trade deadline sell-off — the kind of move that’s hard to square with his and the club’s near-term ambitions in a crowded American League — I sat up in my seat.

“I think, to some degree, I personally, looking back, got caught up in a narrative about a rebuild,” Elias said.

From years on the beat through this role here, I felt like I was narrating that rebuild in real time. Rutschman was a lead character.

And that made the trade deadline Monday tortured, to say the least. It’s been the privilege of my life to tell the stories of the people and players trying to make the Orioles the winning team they should be. All that work continues, even if this trade makes me want to reconsider that.

It’s also not worked out the way anyone thought it would. It’s not as if I’d revise those stories. I just feel complicit in all the disappointment and frustration that’s cropped up over the years for highlighting all the very real reasons for hope I uncovered along the way.

That’s what made Monday so disorienting. (We are talking persistent physical discomfort. Please listen to Monday’s “Banner Baseball Show” in audio form, but do not watch the video.)

No one will hold the 2025 or 2026 Orioles up as shining examples of a project well done. But the organization was well on its way to righting those wrongs, and it did itself a disservice in trading Rutschman.

So I’m living in the same space many others are, wondering what now?

That was the question many players were pondering Tuesday at Camden Yards. This Orioles team sits both within reach of a playoff spot and with the miserable weight of responsibility for playing badly enough for the first four months of the season that these trades were on the table to begin with.

Only the latter felt as if it mattered Tuesday, but you could tell the players and coaches were making themselves believe the trade deadline didn’t spell the end of their chances to steal a playoff spot. Given Rutschman was on the injured list, Taylor Ward’s offensive impact had waned and Chris Bassitt was returning to take Dean Kremer’s spot, some argued privately that the only place they were really diminished in the near term was the bullpen without Tyler Wells.

Yet no one could really reconcile how, in such a weak playoff picture, this team decided not to push to simply get into the postseason and roll the dice. Getting into the playoffs was the goal in 2023 and 2024, when the team consolidated its position at the deadline rather than bolstering its championship odds, understanding the playoffs can be random once you’re in.

The Orioles didn’t want to overinvest in one year. Now they seem to be discounting how unpredictable October can be when faced with the choice to push to get into the tournament.

That doesn’t sit well with me, either. My preferred course of action was to let the Orioles play the season out, because there’s enough talent to win the games they don’t actively undermine themselves in. Much of that upside remains in place — though, arguably, on a shakier foundation, considering the seismic impact these trades had on what’s left of the team’s homegrown core.

Rather than hanging onto Ward, a pending free agent, and Rutschman, Wells and Kremer ahead of their club control expiring in 2027, Elias opted to turn them into long-term value. The Orioles “won” all the trades by those measures. There’s nothing new about this calculus with Elias’ Orioles, though past deals in the same vein came when the club was in far worse shape in the standings and often bad by design.

It feels like a disservice to this era of Orioles baseball, under this ownership group, and under these competitive circumstances, for the same cold logic that applied to Dylan Bundy, Jonathan Villar and many others to apply to a player as meaningful as Rutschman.

All those moves — and pretty much every transaction Elias made those first few years — came with the understanding that he had to make tough, unpopular decisions for the long-term health of the organization. And, even if it made the team a little worse now, the emphasis was always on the future. There was supposed to be a payoff.

It’s strange to me that no one remembers there was one. I certainly narrated some good times. The 2022 Orioles, bolstered by Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson’s arrival, finished 83-79. The next two versions of the club made the playoffs, before things fell apart last year.

That’s the same amount of winning seasons in the last five full ones as the Rays, Giants, Red Sox, Cubs, Guardians, Reds, and Cardinals. Only the Dodgers, Astros, Brewers, Yankees, Phillies and Mariners were winning teams all five years, with just one losing season in that span from the Blue Jays, Padres and Braves.

Many of those teams won playoff games, distinguishing themselves from the Orioles, but to hear Elias himself denigrate all the success the Orioles have had this decade feels like it diminishes all the work that went into it.

And, since he fired Brandon Hyde last year, he’s been reflective on what led to this regression and addressed it with an aggressive offseason of moves focused on the present, all of which prevented this season from being a total disaster just yet.

Plenty of organizational philosophies have shifted too, even if the major league narrative hasn’t caught up. If the team relied only on the low-risk college hitters it took in the first few rounds of its early drafts that by and large haven’t been able to sustain the team’s winning ways, there would be an issue. All the concerns about another rebuild would be warranted, and I’m not narrating another one.

That’s not the case, though. You simply can’t win without starting pitching, and those teams listed above consistently do because they pay for pitching and develop it themselves. The Orioles’ demise started when John Means, Kyle Bradish and Wells went down with elbow injuries in 2024.

Now the Orioles are showing they’re willing to pay real money for starting pitching, as evidenced by the Shane Baz and Bradish contract extensions, and that they can bring legitimate big league starters through their farm (Brandon Young). The high-minors rotations are lousy with future big leaguers, too many to name. And that was true before they added a pair of top pitching prospects from Boston, Anthony Eyanson and Kyson Witherspoon, and reacquired Michael Forret from Tampa Bay.

Similarly, as we lament the muted impact of some of their homegrown position players, they added a handful of high-upside teenagers (Enddy Azocar from Boston and Jhomnardo Reyes from Minnesota). They will combine with the products of their burgeoning international program and the outputs of an uncharacteristically prep-heavy 2026 draft, headlined by outfielders Eric Booth Jr. and Kevin Roberts Jr.

The lack of talent and depth in these demographics, we know now, capped the upside of everything the Orioles were trying to build. It has felt for a while as if they’ve been correcting for that, while throwing capital at proven players for their major league needs.

That makes the decision to trade Rutschman so hard to understand. It not only runs counter to the narrative of the rebuild but also ignores all the work that continued in that same vein once the major league expectations rose.

That’s where I’m still hung up. I can’t even bring myself to dive into the players they got back because it feels like such a regressive response to the trade. I know they’re good players, and I know that matters. But that was how the rebuild was narrated, and that’s not how this should be anymore. It makes me want to pull back from telling the stories that feel too connected to the rebuild days simply by association.

You can never have enough talent on your farm, but it’s hard to believe the Orioles looked at their pitching depth chart and growing group of high-upside teenage prospects and thought they needed to add to it, with trading Rutschman the only solution.

Then again, I’m not sure exactly what problem the Orioles were trying to solve. Even though watching this team play has been deeply unsatisfying for far longer than it should have been, the work to change that remains intact and arguably better in the places the Orioles know now matter most. They didn’t have to have a deadline like this to solidify that — as Elias said Monday — the future is strong.

That’s not some narrative. Take it from the narrator. It already was. It’s just that everything now feels a little worse than it needs to.