Insider report on Harry Ford raises a damning question for Mariners after trade

A couple of days have gone by since the Seattle Mariners pulled a Harry Ford trade out of nowhere on Saturday. The trade is certainly a win for Ford himself, and it also resembles a win for the Mariners from a certain perspective. Yet lingering in the background is a slightly more ominous question: Should it have come to this?

Some Mariners fans are up in arms that the team would trade Ford, ranked by MLB Pipeline as the league's No. 42 prospect, for a seemingly middling left-handed reliever like Jose A. Ferrer. But since he was set to be Cal Raleigh's backup in Seattle, Ford had less value to the Mariners in reality than he did on paper. Ferrer, meanwhile, has closer-caliber stuff hiding underneath his iffy results.

There's also the other subplot at play in the trade that sent Ford to the Washington Nationals, which distills down to this: What if he's not meant to be a catcher?

Insider report on Harry Ford raises a damning question for the Mariners

There was some notable skepticism in this regard over the weekend, and Adam Jude of The Seattle Times pushed things a step further on Sunday evening. He wrote that questions about Ford's defense behind the plate are industry-wide, and quoted one National League scout as saying: “His athleticism just hasn’t translated behind the plate."

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's followed Ford's journey since the Mariners chose him in the first round of the 2021 draft. As a high school catcher, the odds were stacked against him by default. And even while his bat and athleticism shined as he rose through the minor league ranks, questions about his defense only grew louder.

All the while, the Mariners knew that Ford's path to playing time behind the dish was blocked anyway. Even before they extended him this spring, Cal Raleigh was under their control through 2027.

Hence the question: If the Mariners knew that Ford was blocked by Raleigh and not really cut out for catching, why didn't they try him at another position?

The company line as recently as this summer was that the team believed in Ford as a catcher. Yet Jerry Dipoto and the front office clearly weren't blind to their impending dilemma. In 2024, they briefly experimented with Ford in left field while he was with Double-A Arkansas.

It isn't hard to imagine that as the beginning of an alternate scenario. As a 60-grade runner with enough arm to play catcher, Ford hypothetically could have found a comfort zone either in left field or right field. And even if he's more of a 15-homer guy than a 30-homer type, his on-base acumen (i.e., .405 OBP in the minors) and speed could have made him a heck of a base-stealing threat.

In this scenario, the Mariners could have entered this offseason with Ford in the mix to start in right field in 2026. The appeal would have been in his rock-solid floor as a regular at the position, which was dismal in producing 0.5 rWAR and a .618 OPS this season.

Instead, the Mariners basically let Ford's prospect stock plateau, and then kneecapped his trade value by making him Raleigh's de facto backup for 2026. Though Jude is correct in saying that a backup catcher for a potential closer is a trade "any team would make any day," the calculus changes if it's an everyday outfielder on the table.

We'll obviously never know, and the Mariners did indeed make a solid trade for the position they were in with Ford. It's just painful to think that they were in that position only because they backed themselves into it.