MLB trade rumors: Padres wanted Gausman from Orioles for Drew Pomeranz

The Orioles have been linked to just about every starting pitcher that has changed teams over the last month or might change teams over the next week. They are desperate to find a better option for the starting rotation.

If the Orioles had prospects they could trade, or prospects that other teams wanted, they might have been able to pull off one of these trades. Instead, they haven’t happened, because teams want things the Orioles won’t trade.

That includes the Padres, who, according to MLB Network’s Jon Heyman, wanted to get Kevin Gausman from the Orioles for the recently-traded Drew Pomeranz.

Of course this was never going to happen. It wouldn’t have made any sense at all for the Orioles to trade one of their existing starting pitchers for an older pitcher with less remaining service time and not many more big league innings of experience under his belt.

The Padres ended up receiving 18-year-old right-hander Anderson Espinoza from the Red Sox. Espinoza was recently named the #21 prospect in baseball by MLB Pipeline.

The Red Sox could make that trade because they had so many other top prospects it didn’t even matter what they did with the fourth or fifth best of their bunch. Now the Sox get Pomeranz for the next two seasons beyond this.

As long as the Orioles don’t have much to offer from their farm, teams might instead want some of their big league talent. The last two trade deadlines there would occasionally be stories about teams wanting Manny Machado or Jonathan Schoop, players the Orioles would obviously not be trading.

Now the teams who are sellers at the trade deadline probably want Gausman or Dylan Bundy. Other teams aren’t getting those guys in trades either, and so the Orioles aren’t getting the Pomeranz-level players on the market. They can’t even get the Andrew Cashner-level players on the market. Don’t worry, though. There’s always Erasmo Ramirez.