What the Dean Kremer Trade Means And Which Oriole Is Going Next

We already knew the Orioles want to sell and intended to sell and were going to sell at least to some degree, going back in May (when we called for Mike Elias to be fired so someone else could oversee the work to be done).

While others in this market have waffled and wavered and acted as stenographers in print and over the microphones forMike Elias’s ramblings and grifting, we told you in May and June and July what he would say along the way and then what he would do in August, and it’s already begun and they were never going to be a real “buyer” and the sell in on.

We know how Elias, baseball failure, thinks and operates as their chief baseball exec and we’ve come to figure out what makes his billionaire boss tick, David Rubenstein, now over two years into his run in charge, and these two together, at a trade deadline, are a toxic combination.

Of course, they are going to run the same grift as always – the team we sold you in spring training to try to get you to commit to buying a ticket plan really isn’t that good (after gaslighting you about buying and tying to con you through the season that this flawed product is something it’s not). They pull the plug and admit reality at the last possible second on a roster they already didn’t come close to putting enough into in the first place, tell you that next year just as important as this year so let’s start focusing on that … and then Elias systematically saves money for the super rich guy by shedding veteran salary.

Dean Kremer was the first to go late Friday night. He won’t be the last by a long shot.

When Elias said, among other pablum, of Friday before what became another thrilling comeback win: “We can’t sink all of our chips into 2026,” he meant; I’m lightening the load for my boss – who already isn’t doing much – for the right to get to run this same scheme on you next year and the year after. He had the balls to whine about the team’s defense when he literally assured they would be a rampantly unsound team handling the baseball back in March because anyone who knows ball knew the pieces didn’t fit.

Why Start With Kremer?

Kremer has always been a marginal starter – wavering from between slighting below average to slightly above it – who showed flagrant immaturity on the mound too often, was clearly headstrong with an over-inflated sense of what he could accomplish (this front office is famous for that kind of stuff). When he tried to show up the only two position players in the entire organization who have long-term contracts this season – catcher Samuel Basallo early in the season and first baseman Pete Alonso this week in what turned out to be his last start here, that was enough).

Given his inability to hit the post recently and eat up those innings regularly at the back end of the rotation, he had to go. As we told you on “The Daily Flock Show” Friday, they wouldn’t get much for him (even with another year of cheap team control in 2027), and he’d be gone for not much in return.

This was an easy trade to make, which is why it came first.

The only surprise is that the Twins, who many didn’t think would even buy on the margins, were the team on the other side. This feels like the kind of “soft buys” Elias favored in 2023 and 2024, when he pretended to add to rosters but was really doing the lowest common denominator possible to be able to tell people he bought, without making any real trade involving any real prospects for any real difference makers on his MLB roster.

I strongly suspect Opening Day starter Trevor Rogers joins Kremer in heading elsewhere, and figure at least two bullpen arms join him in heading elsewhere. Even if the O's trade five more expected suspects, they will remain around .500 if the adopt the mentality we anticipate and stay in the hunt for the final Wild Card.

What Did The Orioles Get?

If Elias gave a damn about this season he would have prioritized some fringy asset that could maybe help him do something this season – even steal a base off the bench or help against a pocket of lefty bats. Instead he got a teeanager, a lottery ticket, more of the kind of super-high-variance stuff he collected at the deadline a year.

That must change from here on out with more significant assets to peddle and a 2027 rotation and pen to start stocking.

It can't just be more of this kind of transaction where if one of them pop you can have your legion of broadcasters on your payroll try to sell your fanbase on how smart you are, and when virtually none of them become virtually anything, you just figure no one will remember anyway.

Jhomnando Reyes is just 18, and is already in low A after tearing up the complex league. That’s encouraging. Signed for just $300,000 of course the Twins were willing to move on. And once in, I don’t know, 1500 of these transactions, someone unearths a Yordan Alvarez, but we’ve got years of development to go before we can really determine upside.

Reyes was considered just outside of the top 10 of a strong farm system (certainly far ahead of Elias’s), but with a kid this young with such a small sample size of lowest level pro ball, who knows. I feel like Braylin Tavera, a big money international signing here, has been toggling between complex league and Delmarva and Frederick for years and when we watched him last Wednesday in Frederick for the first time in a long time the kid looked totally different to me with an MLB body and strides in his hit tool. But that’s just High-A.

So with Kremer on the outs and the return for him this far off, it’s difficult to leap to many sweeping conclusions about what this signals. Other than we know Elias wasn’t a big fan of Kremer anymore (opened season in AAA), he continued to do dumb stuff on the mound (knowing certain mouthpieces were going to talk about him like Cy Young no matter what), and Elias is most comfortable on the fringes of the deadline making slim moves on the margins for long-term lottery tickets.

Stay tuned Birdland. More selling is coming, and we’ll see to what extreme.

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