Happy Anniversary to the day the Mariners unwittingly traded a future Hall of Famer

On this date back in 1996, the Seattle Mariners made a trade that paid immediate dividends.

They got Dave Hollins from the Minnesota Twins and ultimately got a .916 OPS out of him in 28 games down the stretch of the '96 season. It was part of a bid to make the playoffs that unfortunately fell short, but that didn't make the trade a bust at the time. All it had cost the Mariners was a player to be named later.

The tragicomic thing nearly three decades later, however, is who that PTBNL turned out to be: David Ortiz.

David Ortiz literally wasn't David Ortiz yet when the Mariners traded him

Though the 1992-93 international signing class that included Ortiz — who went by David Arias at the time — was ranked as the best since 1989 by Baseball America in 2020, it didn't cost the Mariners a pretty penny to sign him out of the Dominican Republic. His bonus was a mere $3,500, about 0.5 percent of the size of the largest signing bonus handed out during that signing period.

Ortiz was only 18 in his first season in the minors in 1994, and he hit just .246 with two home runs in 53 games with the Mariners' rookie-class team. He improved to hit .332 with four homers in 48 games, but that only did so much to boost his stock given that he was a 19-year-old who was still playing rookie ball.

It wasn't until 1996 that Ortiz really began turning heads, this time with the Mariners' Single-A affiliate in Wisconsin. He hit .322 with 18 homers across 129 games, which apparently convinced his manager that he should be untouchable in any trade talks the Mariners had.

"I'll never forget them asking me, 'You wouldn't trade Arias for anybody?'" Mike Goff recalled to Scott Lauber for ESPN in 2016. "I go, 'No, I wouldn't trade him for anybody.' That conversation ends, and we make the trade for Dave Hollins. We didn't know who the player to be named later was."

Nonetheless, the trade that Seattle and Minnesota made on August 29, 1996 was officially completed when Ortiz was named as the player to be named later on September 13, 1996. It was after the trade that he changed his name, going from David Arias in honor of his mother to David Ortiz in honor of his father, who had been a pro and semi-pro player in the Dominican Republic.

And the rest, as they say...

“We recognized that he was a prospect — and a good prospect,” Larry Beinfest, the Mariners’ Minor League director in 1996, told Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com in 2022. “But it was still going to be a bit of a time before he made it.”

As it turned out, though, it actually didn't take Ortiz a bit of time before he was ready for the majors.

He shot through the Twins' system as a 21-year-old in 1997, hitting .317 with 31 homers across three levels of the minors. It earned him a ticket to The Show for his major league debut on September 2, 1997, less than a year after he officially landed in the Minnesota organization.

Granted, it was only after the Twins released Ortiz in December of 2002 that his career truly took off. The Boston Red Sox signed him a month later and kept him around for 14 years, in which he hit 483 of his 541 career home runs and won not one, not two, but three World Series championships.

There's never any harm in pondering "What if?" scenarios, however, and the alternate history in which Ortiz stayed in the Mariners organization is dripping with intrigue.

He could have rubbed shoulders with Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Edgar Martínez in the Mariners lineups of the late 1990s. And even if Griffey and A-Rod had still left after 1999 and 2000, Ortiz would have been there to provide power behind Ichiro Suzuki in the early 2000s.

Who knows? Perhaps instead of helping the Red Sox snap the Curse of the Bambino in 2004, Ortiz might have helped the Mariners end a World Series drought that has been going since the franchise's inception in 1977.

We'll never know, of course. And as fair as it is to begrudge the Mariners for not knowing what they had in Ortiz back in 1996, it's hard to begrudge how he went from being a relatively anonymous non-prospect to one of the great sluggers of the 21st century.

And no matter what Hollins is up to now, he'll always be able to say he got traded for a Hall of Famer.