Mariners “TRUM”ing: Hall of Fame, Rebuild, and Randomness

So a few weeks ago, we re-introduced TRUM’ing to the site. An article where we would dump our “Totally Random and Uninteresting Musings” about the Seattle Mariners baseball club.

But after Jerry Dipoto‘s wild ride over the past few weeks, we haven’t had much time to calm down and reflect. We finally have a break in the action, so now is a good time to dive right into these Mariners mini-topics.

Let’s start with the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Today we found out that Lou Piniella, the Mariners manager from 1993-2002, fell one vote shy of being inducted into the Hall of Fame by the veterans committee. It would have been awesome to see “Sweet Lou” get into the Hall of Fame, but he will have to wait 5 more years for another crack at it.

I’m not gonna pretend I can tell you what type of manager he was, as I had just become interested in baseball in 2001. All I can recall is his fiery ejections, but it still would have been a nice treat for Mariners fans who are thinking about heading to Cooperstown sometime in July.

Which segues nicely into the next topic. Edgar Martinez is going to be a Hall of Famer guys. Isn’t that freaking sweet? It is 10 years overdue, but the early tracking has Edgar on 29 of the 29 released ballots. Of course, this will go down, but he just needs 75% of the vote to get elected.

Last season, Edgar finished with just under 71% of the vote, falling a mear 20 votes short of enshrinement. This is where the really interesting thing in the tracking shows up. Edgar has already gained 6 votes from people who didn’t vote for him last winter. We know less than 10% of the projected vote total, but to get up 6 votes this early is incredible.

Back to the 2018 Mariners, they will now be looking for a new assistant GM. Long-time asst. GM Jeff Kingston left the Mariners organization to join the Los Angeles Dodger front office at the same position. Kingston had been with Seattle for 9 years and was in charge of their entire analytics department.

Seattle will now go about the difficult task of replacing him. It will be interesting to see how they approach the position. Do they want another analytics-driven mind? Or do they go a little old school and hand off the analytics department to somebody else. Only time will tell.

The Winter Meetings officially kick off tomorrow. Ken Rosenthal recently reported the Mariners would be one of the busier teams this week. But honestly, without a willingness to move Mitch Haniger, I don’t think you’ll see anything major.

They will still shop Carlos Santana and may find a buyer. But it seems likely the team will stick with Dee Gordon and Kyle Seager for the start of 2019 to try and re-establish some trade value. That approach has a lot of merits as well.

If the Mariners do make any moves, it will likely be signing a bullpen arm or two. Dipoto has traded most of the 2018 bullpen away and has brought in just Anthony Swarzak and Gerson Bautista thus far.

Perhaps the most interesting thing nobody but me will care to follow is the Rule 5 Draft on Thursday. The Mariners have one reliever with a genuine change of being selected, Art Warren, and are in a good position to actually select a player in the MLB portion of the draft for the second straight year.

I love the idea of Drew Jackson as a placeholder until J.P. Crawford is ready, then using him as the utility man. If Seattle does take somebody, it will likely be a pitcher they plan to use out of the bullpen.

Well, it should be an exciting week for fans of baseball. I’m not so certain it will be for Mariners fans, but with Dipoto at the helm, who the heck knows?