Seattle Mariners: FanSided Offseason Simulation Day 1 Recap

Before the real Winter Meetings take place in the coming weeks, representatives from FanSided’s MLB division put on their general manager caps for their respective teams.

Technically, we weren’t even supposed to get this simulation kicked off until today, but plans changed as our excitement took over. Colby and I accomplished quite a bit in our first 24 hours as the ‘general managers’ of the Seattle Mariners, shipping off three starters from the 2019 roster while acquiring loads of quality MLB and MiLB talent.

Before we dive into our completed deals, let’s first go over what exactly our plan (shoutout to Jon Heyman) was heading into this simulation. That plan, of course, is rather simple; make way for the youth by shipping off Dee Gordon and clearing the outfield logjam, acquire controllable Major League ready or near Major League ready talent, and react to the market.

We’ve already done all three, or at least begun the process on certain things. However, some of the biggest items on our to-do list have very little traction at this time, such as finding a deal for Mitch Haniger and/or Omar Narváez. Even then, we still feel really good about where we’re at with what we’ve done thus far.

TRADE WITH TAMPA BAY RAYS

We like Domingo Santana, a lot. But the guy is one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball and is coming off a concerning elbow injury. With Daniel Vogelbach still on the roster (for now), there just isn’t a clear path to getting Santana in the lineup consistently, especially if the elbow lingers on into 2020, so we decided it would be best for him to head elsewhere.

With that, our very first trade of the simulation looked very similar to a lot of Jerry Dipoto‘s ‘firsts’ in his tenure with the Mariners; we made a deal with the Tampa Bay Rays. Joining Santana on his way to the Sunshine State is Raymond Kerr, a 25-year-old left-handed converted starter-to-reliever who’s bumped up his velocity to the high 90s in his newfound role.

Coming back to us in the trade are relievers Anthony Banda and José De León. Unfortunately, this deal is no longer realistic as the latter was traded to the Cincinnati Reds in the real world last night; however, the guidelines of our simulation dictated a roster cut-off point earlier in the week, so wherever each team’s roster was at that point is what our general managers had to work with.

Still, we get two controllable Major League relievers who have a ton of upside despite some injury woes and recent struggles at the highest level. It may be a bit of a let down considering where Santana’s value seemingly was prior to the injury, but it’s still a decent haul for what we’re looking for at this time.

TRADE WITH THE MIAMI MARLINS

This deal was by far the quickest to complete. From the time it was first conceptualized to when it was finalized, perhaps only 10-15 minutes had passed. We were really excited by the opportunity to not only open up a path for Shed Long to become the everyday second baseman, but also address the outfield logjam in one fell swoop, even though we did also acquire a Major League outfielder in this deal.

However, with Lewis Brinson over Mallex Smith, we get an extra year of club control at a cheaper rate for the 2020 season and get our hands on a player who was once one of the best prospects in all of baseball. Now, while Smith had a disappointing 2019 season, his struggles pale in comparison to the horrific start Brinson has had to his career. To say Brinson is a project would be an understatement, and perhaps he’s beyond fixing, but there’s also a hell of a lot more potential there than with Smith, in our eyes.

In addition to Brinson, we also acquired right-handed pitcher José Ureña. The 28-year-old has been less-than-stellar atop a poor Marlins rotation for the last few years, but could be a nice piece at the back-end of our unit or in the bullpen. For now, our plan would be to start Ureña as our #5, especially if Aaron Sanchez isn’t ready to go, and move him to the bullpen once we’re set to call Justin Dunn back up.

Despite sending the Marlins $7 million to cover a large portion of Dee Gordon’s 2020 salary and adding Ureña’s projected $4 million arbitration salary, we were still able to dump ~$5 million in payroll when you factor in Smith’s arbitration projections and Brinson’s league minimum income. Plus, we wound up traded five years of club control between Gordon and Smith for six between Brinson and Ureña. Overall, we feel very much pleased with this one.

TRADE WITH THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES

If you’ve been keeping tabs on our site this offseason, you’ll know we love us some Chris Archer. We’ve posted mock trades revolving around him and even included him in our offseason plan. We were very much willing to match the package we proposed in our offseason plan, but wound up coming away with Archer (and one of the Pirates’ top prospects) for an even cheaper package. So yeah, we’re pretty happy.

We had talks with the Pirates’ faux GM a few days ago about Archer and even came close to a deal that would have sent Domingo Santana their way. But they wound up going a different direction in acquiring an outfielder, which left our discussion more or less dead. However, yesterday, we were able to revisit the topic and we were asked to provided our best offer.

Initially, it was Juan Then and Devin Sweet for Archer straight up. Then, the Pirates mentioned their interest in 19-year-old right-handed pitching prospect Natanael Garabitos and offered utility man Kevin Kramer to us for our troubles.

We were thrilled to get Archer on his own, but when Kramer came into play, that set our excitement through the roof. Kramer has struggled in his limited time at the Major League level thus far, but has yet to even graduate prospect status. In 2018, he dominated the MiLB circuit to the tune of a 141 wRC+ with 15 home runs and 59 RBIs in 129 games. Given the history of success with his bat and his defensive flexibility, he’s a great fit for our roster in its current state and is an absolute steal in our eyes.

Of course, losing three prospects never feels good. But we’re confident that if Archer is able to turn things around as a Mariner, he could theoretically earn us ten times the package we gave up and then some at the deadline, or next offseason. This was a big win for us.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We’re going to keep being aggressive. We’ll continue to look at trades, specifically for Mitch Haniger, Omar Narváez, and Daniel Vogelbach, but we’ve made it clear we’re ready and willing to listen on every player.

On the Haniger front, given that we’ve already dealt Domingo Santana and Mallex Smith, we don’t feel that it’s absolutely necessary to facilitate a Haniger trade, even with the addition of Lewis Brinson. We’re dead set on starting Kyle Lewis and perhaps Jake Fraley in Triple-A for 2020, so Haniger truly isn’t blocking anyone and we’re not going to ship him off if we don’t feel the value of a potential package is worth more to us than Haniger is to our team.

Furthermore, we may even go out and add a veteran outfielder through free agency. We’ve already talked about the likes of Kole Calhoun (who’s now signed with the Pirates in our simulation), Alex Gordon, and Shogo Akiyama, though we’re not really sure which direction we want to go.

We’d love to hear from you guys and see what you think our next move should be. Let us know on Twitter or in the comments section below!

Here’s what our current 40-man roster looks like, which sits at 39 as of now:

Starting Pitchers (8): Marco Gonzales, Chris Archer, Justus Sheffield, Yusei Kikuchi, José Ureña, Aaron Sanchez, Justin Dunn, Ricardo Sánchez

Relief Pitchers (15): Art Warren, Brandon Brennan, Dan Altavilla, Reggie McClain, José De León, Anthony Banda, Taylor Guilbeau, Zac Grotz, Phillips Valdez, Matt Festa, Austin Adams, Gerson Bautista, Matt Magill, Erik Swanson, Sam Tuivailala

Catchers (2): Omar Narváez, Tom Murphy

Infielders (9): Austin Nola, Daniel Vogelbach, Shed Long, Tim Lopes, Donnie Walton, Kyle Seager, J.P. Crawford, Kevin Kramer, Dylan Moore

Outfielders (5): Mitch Haniger, Lewis Brinson, Jake Fraley, Braden Bishop, Kyle Lewis