Trey Mancini signs one-day contract to retire an Oriole: ‘One of the great honors of my life’

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Trey Mancini never presumed this would come to be, because as he said in his own words, there have been better baseball players. But the former first baseman was at Camden Yards on Saturday so he could retire an Oriole because there have been few better baseball people.

In what he called “one of the great honors of my life,” Mancini signed a one-day contract. Then, in front of the fans who helped make him a beloved character in Baltimore, he took the field with his wife, Sara, and their daughter, Sadie, to thank the crowd.

“It felt like home to me from the day I was drafted in 2013, and that never stopped, until I got traded in 2022,” Mancini said. “I couldn’t have imagined starting my career anywhere else and being anywhere else.”

The Mancini story is ingrained into the fabric of the last decade of Orioles baseball. There was plenty of losing in that decade. But Mancini was a light around which Baltimore could gather, particularly after he overcame Stage 3 colon cancer.

Mancini missed all of 2020. He returned in 2021, winning the American League Comeback Player of the Year award, before he was traded midway through 2022 to the Houston Astros. Mancini won a World Series with Houston, but he looked odd in any other uniform.

“Even after I was traded, I think there was a piece of me that was left here and always knew that I’d come back after my playing days and always affiliate myself with this franchise,” Mancini said.

In the back of the room where Mancini signed his contract Saturday stood athletic trainer Pat Wesley. He was part of the group in 2020 that identified something amiss with Mancini’s blood work, and it’s no stretch when Mancini says the Orioles saved his life.

That blood work is why he could look out to Sara Perlman, whom he met in Baltimore, and Sadie.

“It’s so amazing to come back and be where everything started,” Mancini said. “And I owe my life as I know it to this city and this franchise.”

After Mancini departed the Astros, he signed with the Chicago Cubs and struggled mightily. He felt “broken” from a baseball perspective after that season, and his time away in 2024 allowed him to repair. For a while, he was content with the idea his baseball career might be done.

After that year, though, “it kept eating away at me that I wasn’t going to be a major leaguer again, and I thought I could do it,” Mancini said. “I thought it was possible. Although, at this point, I’m 34, I play first base, I’m right-handed — it’s just, analytically, the least sexy profile you can ever have. So I just knew the odds were stacked against me.”

He made two comeback attempts, one with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2025 and another with the Los Angeles Angels this year. The latter worked. Injuries for the Angels prompted Mancini’s emotional return to the majors.

It was short-lived, and that’s OK. Mancini knew that would be the case. But his daughter was present to see him play in the majors one more time, which made it worth it.

“The whole goal was to make it back up and end my career on my terms, more so than how it was kind of ended for me three years prior,” Mancini said. “And I knew that, the rest of my life, I could look back and have no regrets.”

Mancini wouldn’t change anything about his time in Baltimore, either. From the beginning, he said, this felt like home. And on Saturday his one-day contract allowed him to cap his career as an Oriole for life.