During the Orioles’ frenzied trade deadline selloff in 2025, one of the last deals to come in under the wire was the biggest of them all: a seven-player swap that sent Ryan O’Hearn and Ramón Laureano to the Padres for five prospects.
It was a trade that, even in a lost season for the Birds, brought grumbling from a large swath of the fan base. O’Hearn and Laureano were two of the Orioles’ most productive bats, and while O’Hearn was a pending free agent, Laureano was under team control for another
season, irking O’s fans who wondered why the club would give up on a potentially valuable piece for 2026. (It didn’t quite turn out that way, as Laureano struggled to a .660 OPS for San Diego this year before suffering a season-ending labrum injury in May.)
Still, Mike Elias found the package of prospects the Padres offered as a deal too good to pass up. The headliner was the towering lefty Boston Bateman, now one of the Birds’ best pitching prospects, whom we’ll discuss in a separate article. Two others, infielder Cobb Hightower and righty Tyson Neighbors, won’t appear on many prospect lists. Hightower played just 18 games this season before undergoing ACL surgery, while Neighbors bombed to an 8.82 ERA in 33 minor league games this year.
Then there’s the other two prospects from the trade. Victor Figueroa and Brandon Butterworth aren’t household names, and they don’t possess the kind of high-ceiling potential that Bateman does. But both of them delivered performances in 2026 that put them on the radar as possible future big leaguers.
Let’s start with Butterworth, who has shown himself to be more than just the guy whose name reminds me of pancakes. The Padres’ 12th-round pick in 2024 out of NC State, Butterworth was having a solid season offensively in High-A when the O’s acquired him last July, posting a .782 OPS and ranking third in the league with 155 total bases. Still, it wasn’t his bat that made him intriguing.
FanGraphs, which ranked Butterworth as the Orioles’ #27 prospect in May, praised him as a “plus glove” with “great hands and a strong arm.” The article’s co-authors, Eric Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski, wrote, “He has plenty of range for the position, but what really stands out is the speed with which he gobbles a grounder, transfers, and fires accurately from any angle.”
Butterworth is a versatile defender, too. In the minors this season, he started at least eight games apiece at five different positions: second base, shortstop, third base, left field, and center field, with shortstop (33 games) being his most frequent one. “Whatever gets me in the lineup, I’ll catch if you guys need me to, it doesn’t matter,” Butterworth told PressBoxOnline. His defensive prowess was enough for Longenhagen and Gawlowski to project him as a future utility infielder, but they cautioned, “Butterworth isn’t going to hit much.”
Maybe he’s not. But you wouldn’t know it from his 2026 performance at the plate. Starting the season at Double-A Chesapeake, where he’d posted just a .677 OPS in 34 games last year, Butterworth erupted. In 52 games, he posted a .269/.377/.497 line — all career highs — and bashed 10 home runs and 22 extra-base hits.
Butterworth’s season was interrupted by a knee injury in early May that sidelined him for two months. Once he returned to the Baysox, he was more locked in than ever. During his first 27 games back from the IL, Butterworth his .294 with a .953 OPS. That hot streak earned him a promotion to Triple-A Norfolk, where, at 24, he was more than three years younger than the average player. He struggled to acclimate there, batting .208/.296/.396 in 28 games.
Because of Butterworth’s extended IL stint this season, the Orioles are sending him to the Arizona Fall League to get some more reps. There doesn’t seem to be much question that his glove is major league ready, but the 5-foot-9 utility man will need to prove he can hit enough to be worthy of a bench spot in the bigs. He’s held his own, and occasionally thrived, at every rung of the minor league ladder so far. Triple-A will the next task for him to conquer, with an eye on a potential late-2027 big league debut.
Butterworth’s fellow trade acquisition, Figueroa, is a very different type of player. His defense isn’t his ticket to the majors. Nor is he going to slap-hit the ball with a contact-oriented approach. The 6-foot-5 first baseman does one thing above all else: mash lots of dingers.
Figueroa’s 27 home runs this season were the most of any Orioles minor leaguer. He blasted 22 of them for High-A Frederick before a late-July promotion to Chesapeake, where he hit five more. It was a dramatic improvement over his 2025 performance, when he went homerless in 98 PAs after joining the O’s organization.
The 22-year-old, an 18th-round Padres pick in 2024 from Florida SouthWestern State College, clocked in at #33 in FanGraphs’ rankings in May. “Figueroa has real thunder in his hands and enough juice to hit for power the opposite way, which he must because his swing’s length causes him to spray most of his well-struck contact that way,” write Longenhagen and Gawlowski. “He’s a stiff-legged guy and below-average athlete, a one-tool player with enough power to carry some value despite his issues.”
Chief among those issues: the strikeouts. Figueroa fanned in more than 30% of his plate appearances this year, racking up 155 Ks in all. Anyone striking out that much in the minors is going to have a very difficult path to the majors, so Figueroa will need to cut down the swing-and-miss to have a future as anything more than an organizational player.
The lefty-swinging Figueroa also had rather drastic splits. He crushed right-handers to the tune of a .935 OPS, hitting 24 homers against them. Versus southpaws, Figueroa’s OPS was nearly 300 points lower (.638), and he totaled only three roundtrippers in 109 PAs.
Let’s be clear here. Neither Figueroa nor Butterworth represents a star in the making for the Orioles. The odds are against either of them having an extended major league career, if they make it to the bigs at all. But if you squint, you can make out a scenario where one or both of them contributes in some way, Butterworth as a useful utility guy and Figueroa as a bench bat with some pop.
It may not be sexy, but every team needs a few players who can serve as complementary pieces to the team’s biggest stars. Now the Orioles need to work on actually getting big stars, but that’s a story for another time.
