On Tuesday, it was 40-man decision day, which often brings several minor trades, as with the four-player deal the Chicago White Sox and Tampa Bay Rays made that afternoon.
However, we got a late-night surprise as the Baltimore Orioles traded their 2018 first-round pick, Grayson Rodriguez, their No. 1 pitching prospect for years, to the Los Angeles Angels for Taylor Ward, a one-year rental who plays a position of apparent depth for Baltimore.
On the face of this, it looks like a heist for the Angels. They get Rodriguez, who has four years left until free agency and looked like at least a mid-rotation starter when we last saw him on a mound, while giving up Ward, a league-average left fielder who will be a free agent after 2026.
It will be much easier for the Angels to find a left fielder in free agency to replace Ward than it would have been to find someone comparable in value to Rodriguez, whose salary will be suppressed by the arbitration process through 2029.
The catch for the Angels, and the reason this could work out for the Orioles, is that Rodriguez hasn’t thrown a pitch in a professional game since July 2024, suffering three distinct injuries in that span. His elbow began bothering him in spring training this year, eventually requiring debridement surgery to remove a bone spur and any damaged tissue or bone in the joint.
The Orioles limited Rodriguez’s pitching during his minor-league tenure about as much as any team did with a major pitching prospect in the last decade, and the result was … nothing.
He still got hurt, repeatedly, as it turns out. He felt pain in his throwing shoulder this April, then strained a lat muscle while trying to come back from the elbow and shoulder issues. He missed the last two months of the 2024 regular season with a strain of his right teres muscle, which is near but not technically part of the shoulder joint, and missed time that April and May with shoulder soreness.
That’s a lot of missed time in the past two years, culminating in an operation that ended his most recent season. If you’re focused on 2026, how many innings can you reasonably project Rodriguez to throw, and at what level of effectiveness? Can he sit 98-99 mph, as he did at the end of 2023, with that wipeout changeup and still hold up as a starter for most of a full season?
It makes more sense for the Angels to take on that risk-reward profile, which includes the upside of a No. 2 starter, than the Orioles, who are very geared toward contention in 2026. Baltimore was a well below-average team against left-handed pitching in 2025, with an 87 wRC+ that ranked 20th in the majors, including a .297 OBP against them.
Ward crushes southpaws, with a .283/.354/.470 career line against them, and had one of his best seasons against lefties in 2025. The acquisition also gives the Orioles a real surplus of corner bats and should allow them to trade one or more of those guys for more near-term pitching. I’d expect Dylan Beavers or Colton Cowser to be on the market, although they may have missed their ideal window on Cowser.
The trade only works for Baltimore if it aggressively goes after pitching for 2026, though. The Orioles have to sign a significant starter — not another back-end type like Tomoyuki Sugano, who had a 5.00 ERA in the second half and allowed 14 homers in 57 innings — and trade for one as well to assemble a competitive rotation.
They have the upper-level pitching depth to give them the seven or eight nominal starters they’ll need to get through a season, with Trey Gibson, Nestor German and possibly Levi Wells all likely to at least start a game for Baltimore this year. The organization still needs to acquire a frontline starter or two, however, to replace what it had hoped Rodriguez would become before injuries derailed him.
However, for the Angels, why not? They’re coming off a 90-loss season, and Ward wasn’t going to make a whit of difference to their playoff odds in 2026. They can afford to be patient with Rodriguez, managing him slowly this next year to get him into a full-time rotation spot in 2027 (assuming that season happens) and beyond.
It’s a move so logical, I can’t believe Arte Moreno approved it.