While it may not have been much noticed in New York, where both Yankees and Mets partisans were gloating over the excellent trades their teams made, this was, even outside the five boroughs, one of the more significant trade deadlines we’ve seen in the last few years. Curiously, it was so less for the deals that were made than for those that weren’t. This is partly the consequence of the absurdly weak state of the National League, in which only five teams are above .500; since more or less every other team has a shot at the wild card, almost none of them wanted to sell. But it’s also the consequence of plain bad management.

Perhaps the most egregious case, though, was in the American League. Multiple reports had the Baltimore Orioles getting extremely strong offers for shortstop Miguel Tejada from several teams, offers so strong it would seem insane to have turned them down. In one typical permutation, for instance, the Astros would have sent them ace pitcher Roy Oswalt, shortstop Adam Everett, and third baseman Morgan Ensberg, and the Orioles would then have been able to extract Lastings Milledge and extras from the Mets in exchange for Oswalt.

It’s difficult to know exactly what solid offers there were, but more important than the particulars is the fact that owner Peter Angelos thinks he’s a baseball man. Of course an owner has to be involved to some extent in trade discussions for a player of Tejada’s caliber, but Angelos’s style is to involve himself so heavily, take so much time in his deliberations, and change his mind so frequently that his team just can’t get deals done. Whether or not the Orioles could have made a franchise-altering deal — whether or not executives even thought it was a good idea to trade Tejada, arguably the best player in the league, for that matter — this sort of thing is why, despite huge revenues and a strong talent base, the Orioles always stink.

Right nearby, the Washington Nationals, having been busy auctioning off Alfonso Soriano for several weeks, didn’t move him in the end. As this wasn’t symptomatic of some deep organizational sickness, but rather just something stupid, it really wasn’t as bad as the Orioles’ inability to trade their disgruntled superstar for a massive collection of young talent, but on its own merits it was inarguably worse.

Soriano is having a great season, but the Nationals are one of just three teams with no conceivable shot at the playoffs, and unlike Tejada, he’s a free agent at the end of the year. The hangup seems to have been that their general manager, Jim Bowden, having brayed to all who would listen that he would rather keep Soriano and either try to resign him or watch him leave as a free agent than trade him for less than two premium prospects, refused to cave in even after it became clear that just wasn’t going to happen.

If the Orioles’ case is one of underlying illness, the Nationals’ problem was an inability to quickly adjust to a shifting market.Teams used to trade top prospects for two-month rentals; they simply don’t do that anymore. Not even the Mets, Yankees, or Red Sox, who could do fine without cheap young players at all, do that. As a one-time mistake, this is fine; if Bowden continues to act as if it’s still the late ’90s, though, the Nationals are going to have persistent, deeply rooted problems for years to come.

The third big loser was the Pirates, whose trades with the two New York teams simply made no sense on any level whatsoever. The one thing a perpetually bad team can’t afford to do is trade for mediocrity. New Royals GM Dayton Moore, for instance, quietly spent the weeks leading up to the trade deadline trading literally everything he could for any B- or even Cgrade prospects he could get, the sound logic being that subpar veterans aren’t going to help a team as bad as the Royals on any level, whereas if you have 15 second- and third-tier prospects, you’ll probably end up shaking a few useful players and maybe even a star out of the bunch. The Pirates just don’t understand that.

Of all the players involved in their deals with the Yankees and Mets, exactly one — Oliver Perez, who may never start another game in the majors but also has the potential to win a Cy Young award or two — is of any use to them. The players they brought in, Shawn Chacon and Xavier Nady, aren’t valuable to them at all; there are plenty of fifth starters and fourth outfielders on the waiver wires and in the minor leagues. It’s the oddest thing to watch the Pirates, as they have the same team, year after year after year.The names may change, but the players — soft-tossing fifth starters, slow right fielders with poor on-base averages and mediocre slugging averages, second basemen who are really miscast utilitymen — remain exactly the same.

Like the Orioles and the Nationals, it’s what they didn’t do — scoop up a couple of lottery tickets for their few commodities—that makes no sense. It’s the reason why, in a league full of very bad teams, they’re the very worst.

tmarchman@nysun.com