to trade or not to trade

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

TO TRADE OR NOT TO TRADE, that is the ques­tion. To­day’s Seattle Times (July 19, 2003) has a piece ti­tled “Mariners Tough Spot: To Trade Or Not?” by the pa­per’s reg­ular base­ball re­porter, Larry Stone (page C1): the Seattle Mariners, may NOT make any trades in the fore­see­able fu­ture. This de­spite the fact that they seem to be on their way to an­other season of 90 losses.

The M’s are a hap­less or­ga­ni­za­tion (do I want to use “in­com­pe­tent” or some­thing sim­ilar here in­stead of “hap­less”?), es­pe­cially at the top—and I am re­fer­ring to own­er­ship and the gen­eral man­ager. It seems they are al­ways re­building, yet al­ways picking up vet­eran players with no value in the fu­ture when the younger players blossom (hope­fully).

“It’s quite conceivable—indeed, even probable—that the Mariners re­ally don’t want to delve into whole­sale trading, with all the pos­sible ram­i­fi­ca­tions,” sayeth Mr. Stone. While his piece deals re­al­is­ti­cally with both sides of sev­eral ar­gu­ments, I have only one side to argue: trade those vets that have REAL value but make re­ally HARD trades.

If the Mariners want to have yet an­other youth move­ment, go for it 100% and see what hap­pens three years from now.

Each player of value to a con­tending team should be traded for a re­place­ment player—an es­tab­lished major league player who can step right in and as­sume the traded play­er’s position—and at least one promising (young) rookie or a top AAA or AA prospect.

Forget the draft! Get players who ei­ther can play in the bigs NOW or, at least, can play in the mi­nors and look like they can play in the show later on!

As much as we all want to see Raul Ibanez break Ted Williams’ record for home runs by a 42-year old player (and Teddy Ball­game was my first sports hero as a kid), he is much more valu­able as trade-bait to a con­tending team that needs a batter with power to hit be­hind their clean-up batter.

Tempted as I am to write end­lessly about base­ball in gen­eral and the Mariners (or my beloved Phillies), I will end here by saying this: if the Mariners want to have yet an­other youth move­ment, go for it 100% and see what hap­pens three years from now. Even if the M’s stand pat and have a hel­luva second half—Stone says they will have to play .567 ball for the next 41 games to end the season as a .500 team!—my ar­gu­ment will still stand.

To trade or not to trade . . .

Go go, Mariners!!!

3 thoughts on “to trade or not to trade”

    • I dunno about in­sane, but I would ac­cept “stoopit.” In the world of sports (in­cluding the jocks, the writers, the radio talk­show hosts, and the fans), it is dif­fi­cult to get across the idea that, when a team loses con­sis­tently year after year, re­gard­less of the players on the team, then it ain’t the players’ fault, it’s the ownership! 

      The cur­rent owners of the Mariners AS A GROUP may be the wealth­iest in base­ball. They are willing to spend good money on players, they just don’t hire the right GMs to hire the right ballplayers for the money they spend.

      Of course, with the fans and the pun­dits, all you hear about is how this guy isn’t playing up to the ex­pec­ta­tions that his con­tract en­gen­ders. Oh well, lah-dee-dah, and hoo-hah!

      Reply
    • TIMBER Apolo­gies for the delay in re­sponding here: I just re­al­ized that I have sev­eral “pending” com­ments! What is “in­sane” (maybe “inane” is more apt) to me is that year after year, some teams stay losers and al­though there are dif­ferent players year after year, THEY get blamed. Ob­vi­ously, when a team places in the bottom half con­sis­tently, there is, at the very least, a problem with the per­cep­tion of base­ball re­ality in the front of­fice. Thanks for the input! NEAL

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