Sodo Mojo’s 2019 Seattle Mariners Off-Season Plan

The time has finally arrived. Today, we unveil our website’s plan for how your Seattle Mariners should attack this off-season.

But before we get to the fun stuff, let’s lay down some of the ground rules for our little experiment. First, we are taking into account the real-world limitations of the Seattle Mariners. They have players they will not move and they have a budget that they won’t wildly exceed this winter, no matter how much you want them to.

Understanding those limitations, we have set a fairly strict $30 million budget to spend on new players this winter, roughly the same salary as the now-departed Felix Hernandez made in 2019. Once you factor in the players already waived by the Mariners and the fact we are waiving Tim Beckham, we have about $36 million to spend.

You won’t find any Gerrit Cole or Anthony Rendon in our plan either. They are great and we’d love to have them. But again, we run into the realism problem and it’s hard to see either player even being interested in Seattle.

Other than that, everything is on the table. If you can make it fit salary-wise and the move itself makes sense for a rebuilding team, we are willing to consider it. Now that you know our rules, let’s quickly cover the process.

First, about a month ago, we gave these rules to our team of writers and said, “come up with a plan and send it to us if interested”. We got 4 individual plans and in our latest podcast (click here to listen) Ty Gonzalez and yours truly, set out to mold a comprehensive plan.

Well, we failed. But instead of continuing to wring our hands and argue over the same talking points, we have come to an understanding. The idea of saying we are going to trade player x for players y and z isn’t really the point of this exercise.

Now don’t get me wrong, each slide will contain at least one potential trade proposal that we have agreed is at least somewhat reasonable. But this isn’t about trying to predict what will happen. This is just about identifying targets and what we would be willing to give up to make it happen.

With all that in mind, we present to you, Sodo Mojo’s 2019 Off-Season Plan.