Taylor Ward is a good ballplayer who can improve the Orioles in 2026, yet in the days since he was acquired from the Los Angeles Angels it’s been easy for that to get obscured.

He was traded for Grayson Rodriguez, once the game’s top pitching prospect and for the first half of this decade a source of hope for the Orioles to draft and develop their first homegrown ace since Mike Mussina. It’s been rightly pointed out that his acquisition feels necessitated by the underperformance of last year’s big-ticket free agent, Tyler O’Neill, which leads to its own conversations about last winter as we turn our attention to this one.

But you can learn a lot about Ward by holding him next to someone whose roster fate, oddly enough, they will be deciding when the deadline to tender contracts to arbitration-eligible players hits at 6 p.m. Friday: Ryan Mountcastle.

Mountcastle feels like the Orioles’ highest-profile bubble candidate, with a projected 2026 salary of $7.8 million, according to MLBTradeRumors.com. The 28-year-old first baseman could easily prove worth that if he hits anywhere near his career averages. If the Orioles really aren’t worried about money, that’s not a number they should be sweating.

Still, some performance and playing time trends suggest the club could be ready to move on from him and hand the position to Coby Mayo.

Even if the Orioles hadn’t traded four years of Rodriguez’s potential prime for a season of Ward, throwing everything we know about their approach to team building into disarray, this wouldn’t be a simple decision. That trade adds even more intrigue.

What feels most relevant is that Mountcastle’s 2025 — when he hit seven home runs with a .653 OPS in 89 games, missed two months with a hamstring injury and ceded first base to Mayo by season’s end — was below the standard he’d set for the preceding four years.

Mountcastle has spent the last four seasons as a modestly above-average offensive player who was the unluckiest hitter in the majors.

According to BaseballSavant.com, no player had a wider negative difference between his weighted on-base average (.314) since the start of 2022 and his expected weighted on-base average (.343) than Mountcastle. That comes down to playing half his games at Camden Yards, where from 2022-24 the left-field wall was excessively punishing to right-handed sluggers. The 2025 realignment didn’t benefit Mountcastle, who failed to take advantage of the wall coming in before his injury.

Mountcastle’s decline was stark enough that it’s a real conversation as to whether the Orioles tender him a contract, though there are other factors involved. One is Mayo now being exclusively a first baseman. Because the designated hitter spot might be earmarked for whichever of Adley Rutschman and Samuel Basallo isn’t behind the plate, a second right-handed-hitting first baseman may be redundant.

Then again, a projected $7.8 million isn’t too much money for a team not concerned about its budget. You’d basically need one win above replacement for Mountcastle to be good value for that contract, and he delivered more than that in each of the three seasons prior to 2025, according to FanGraphs.

It might even be a bargain, considering the Orioles will be paying for the actual production rather than the expected production, because we know what it might look like if Mountcastle had slugged as much as you’d expect with he contact he made. It would look a lot like Ward, whose wOBA since the start of 2022 is .339 — a few ticks below what Mountcastle’s xwOBA is in that span.

Ward is a career .247 hitter with a .766 OPS, a 114 wRC+ and 113 home runs. Mountcastle is a lifetime .263 hitter with a .750 OPS, a 107 wRC+ and 98 home runs. Ward is projected to make $13.7 million, according to MLBTradeRumors.com, which makes those 15 additional home runs feel significant — as does the fact that Mountcastle couldn’t stick in left field when the Orioles tried him there in 2020 and 2021.

His production for a first baseman just doesn’t stack up to peers.

All this begs the question, however, of why one player was worth trading Rodriguez for and the other, who could make around $6 million less, might not be tendered a contract. There are a few answers, one being the defensive situation.

The Orioles were (and even after this still probably are) seeking outfield upgrades. Ward was one of the most proven right-handed outfielders available, while you could argue Mountcastle has already been replaced by Mayo at first base. They value depth, but he’d be the expensive kind.

Another is their career trajectories, with Ward sustaining his peak while Mountcastle has tapered off. Some of that has to do with the dimensions in Baltimore, but there are two durable traits that Ward has that Mountcastle has always lacked.

First, there’s his plate discipline. Mountcastle swings at pitches outside the strike zone and as a result doesn’t walk, while Ward doesn’t chase often and walks at a high rate.

The other is that Ward gets the most out of his contact. He doesn’t hit the ball as hard as Mountcastle does, but he pulls it in the air — which is most conducive to homers — more consistently.

Those are skills the Orioles value, and in Ward they have both. He can make the lineup better by doing those things consistently in 2026. He’s shown you can count on that over the last several years — and I guess that’s the point.

Ward was acquired for a pitcher the Orioles openly said they couldn’t count on for 2026. Mountcastle has been the best version of himself sporadically over the last couple of years, and it feels like it’s still in there, but after the events of this week I wonder what level of uncertainty the Orioles are interested in carrying into next season.

The heart of their offseason pursuits is going to be adding as many good players as possible. They added one to their lineup this week — and on Friday they get to decide whether he’ll be replacing Mountcastle or hitting alongside him against lefties come the spring.