The Seattle Mariners most recent spate of trades undermines their ability to contend in 2019
Entering this off season, Seattle Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto held a half dozen contracts traceable back to his predecessor, Jack Zduriencik. When the Robinson Cano deal to New York is finalized, he will retain two of them.
During the 2018 season, the Mariners had five players who produced at more than +1.0 Wins Above Average. When the Jean Segura and Cano-Edwin Diaz deals are finalized, they will retain just one of those five, Mitch Haniger.
Seattle fans could be forgiven for asking why their team appears to firmly committed to a teardown.
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The Mariners finished outside the playoffs for the 17th consecutive season, the longest ongoing string in major American professional sport. At the same time, they did win 89 games. That marks an 11-game improvement over 2017, and Seattle’s best record since 2003.
With any team, the first presumption is that they’re trying to qualify for post-season play. Increasingly in recent years, a second presumption has taken hold; that if you can’t contend, you tear down. The widely perceived place not to be is in the middle.
The Mariners haven’t said this openly, but the logical inference of their decisions to unload Cano, Diaz, James Paxton, Mike Zunino and Jean Segura is that they aren’t positioned to contend in 2019, so they need to resort to option two.
It is common for GMs to undertake teardowns of rosters they inherit, and frequently with good reason: If that roster had been any good, the guy they replaced probably wouldn’t have lost his job. It’s a model DiPoto has followed assiduously in Seattle, where only one of the 37 players with big league experience he inherited from Zduriencik was re-signed. That lone exception was infielder Franklin Gutierrez, re-signed for a single season prior to 2016 and then released.
Cano, Paxton, Zunino and Nelson Cruz, a free agent, are merely the latest; the only holdovers now are Felix Hernandez – whose nearly $28 million contract will expire at the end of 2019 – and Kyle Seager, who has three seasons remaining on the 7 year, $100 million deal Zduriencik gave him. They both had bad 2018s.
Seattle Mariners
Money can also be part of the equation, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in Seattle. The club’s payroll has historically been around the $158 million spent for 2018 with little indication of a change next season. Attendance was 2.3 million, the club’s best in a decade. Club revenues for 2018 have not yet been released, but they have in recent years been flat, hovering around $288 million.
The question is whether Seattle was slipping so inexorably toward the end of its rope by the end of 2018 that a teardown was necessary, or whether the club remained a legitimate contender as constituted prior to the trades.
Going strictly by the record, the Mariners needed to make up eight games on the Athletics in order to supplant them as the second wild card team. But the A’s hardly appear to be a dynasty in the making, with a projected starting rotation of journeymen and one of the game’s lowest payrolls that can be used to patch holes.
Seattle’s other immediate contender for wild card status is Tampa Bay. The Rays won one game more than the Mariners in 2018. But Tampa is a virtual carbon copy of Oakland, with questions dotting the pitching staff and revenue issues that make consistency a challenge.
To the extent one can speculate on Dipoto’s motivation for a teardown, it may have to do with the club’s performance down the stretch. Through Aug. 1, Seattle was in the second wild card position. In the final two months, however, the Mariners went 26-29.
The Seattle Mariners may have disappointed themselves and their fans, but a bad two months of 2018 is no reason to quit on the future…especially when the team’s first playoff appearance in nearly two decades is so close.