How Miami's Trevor Rogers trade heist helped derail 2025 Orioles season

Peter Bendix has crammed a lot of transactions into his brief tenure as Miami Marlins president of baseball operations, including six moves on the day of the 2024 MLB trade deadline. None of them were as popular among Marlins fans in the moment as the deal sending left-hander Trevor Rogers to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for infielder Connor Norby and outfielder Kyle Stowers. It doesn't take an industry insider to see a robbery in broad daylight.

Squint very hard and you can see the Orioles' vision (sort of). They had to try something at the deadline to bolster their perpetually shaky starting rotation. The defending American League East division champions were clinging to a half-game lead over the New York Yankees, but the market was thin on starters who had multiple years of club control remaining. They settled for Rogers and had a plan for maximizing his potential after several seasons of injuries and mediocrity.

And the O's were justified in viewing Norby and Stowers as expendable assets. They already had bigger and better versions of them in Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad. Both Mayo and Kjerstad were consensus top-50 MLB prospects entering the 2024 season and had been performing as such with Triple-A Norfolk, each with an OPS in the high .900s at the time of the deal. 

Rogers had posted a 4.53 ERA, 4.43 FIP and .276 BAA for the Marlins that season, averaging five innings per start. He couldn't even reach that level in Baltimore (7.11 ERA, 5.01 FIP and .338 BAA with 4.75 IP/GS), striking out fewer batters than any other comparable stretch of his career. The Orioles optioned him to Triple-A after only four outings and did not recall him the rest of the year. They finished three games behind the Yankees and got knocked out in the opening round of the postseason, swept by the visiting Kansas City Royals in the AL Wild Card Series.

As disappointing as that was, Rogers' contractual situation still gave the Orioles hope of salvaging the trade entering 2025. The 27-year-old settled for a modest $2.6 million to avoid arbitration and had a full winter to put the club's fresh ideas into practice.

It turns out he made it only most of the way through the winter before suffering a right knee dislocation. Rogers was behind schedule this spring and had to be placed on the injured list. He began a minor league rehab assignment on April 23. His first four starts on the farm looked a lot like his last four big league starts of 2024, so they formally optioned him again on May 11. An Orioles pitching staff with a 5.52 ERA (ranked 29th in MLB) does not view this version of Rogers as a clear reinforcement? Yikes.

Regardless, the Orioles' ultra-talented lineup would be productive enough to keep them in contention this season, right? Not even close, as it turns out.

All-Star third baseman Jordan Westburg regressed and suffered a left hamstring strain in late April. There is no timeline for his return following a recent setback. His understudy, Coby Mayo, was called up, only to be jettisoned back to Norfolk less than a week later. In 21 career MLB games dating back to the Rogers trade, Mayo has an inconceivably bad .094/.186/.094 slash line with strikeouts in nearly half of his plate appearances. Meanwhile, manning the same position, Norby has been a league-average bat with his new team.

The O's also figured that the corner outfield spots were accounted for. They already had Kjerstad and 2024 AL Rookie of the Year runner-up Colton Cowser. Moreover, their largest position player expenditure of the offseason was inking Tyler O'Neill to a three-year, $49.5 million free agent contract.

Kjerstad, Cowser and O'Neill have combined to hit .195 with seven home runs. All by himself, Stowers is hitting .305 with 10 homers. Stowers' 1.3 fWAR in 2025 easily clears anybody on Baltimore's roster.

Despite spending more than twice as much on their payroll this season as the Marlins, the Orioles' record is three games worse. They have just fired manager Brandon Hyde for shortcomings that were very clearly beyond his control.

The front office could have capitalized on the prospect hype surrounding Mayo or Kjerstad (or both) to trade for a true top-of-the-rotation starter, rather than a reclamation project like Rogers. Jesús Luzardo's value was dinged coming off an injury-riddled 2024 campaign—the O's easily had enough ammunition to outbid the Philadelphia Phillies, but didn't.

The silver lining for Orioles GM Mike Elias is his team has cratered so badly, they are in contention for one of the top picks in the 2026 MLB Draft. Elias has consistently turned early-round picks into quality big leaguers, even if the process takes awhile as it did for Stowers. However, if next season's results are anything like what we're currently witnessing, he won't remain employed long enough to oversee the development of that draft class.