Seattle Mariners Trade Rumors: Believe Them When You See Them
By Todd Pheifer
Get ready, Mariners fans. We are inching closer to the most exciting part of the baseball season. No, not the playoffs.
It is time for trade rumors!
If the Seattle Mariners keep winning a reasonable amount of games in the next few weeks, they may be prominently featured in the trade rumors that circulate at a furious pace around the Internet. It isn’t the dominant teams that will be discussed the most, but rather the teams that are flirting with a playoff spot.
The Mariners would certainly qualify for that category.
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Of all the major professional sports, it is fair to suggest that baseball may have the most hype when it comes to the trade deadline. This isn’t to suggest that all the rumors come to fruition, because most of them simply don’t.
The MLB trade deadline is big because major stars can change zip codes, and the packages that are exchanged can be an interesting mix of salary dumps and unproven prospects that may come back to bite the selling organization in the future.
Granted, Seattle fans should probably be thankful that the Mariners are actually in trade rumors that involve “buyers.” In past years, there was an automatic assumption that the M’s would be sellers, and that they should obviously trade Felix Hernandez to a team like the New York Yankees.
After all, don’t the Mariners know that they are supposed to be a farm team for the rest of the league so that MLB can maintain their economic imbalance? But, I digress.
The major point here is that fans cannot get sucked in. Don’t do it!
What is the danger here, you ask? The danger is that fans start to play general manager, and that can be difficult given the typically biased perspective.
In addition, fans can believe that “anonymous sources” are actually all real and can be trusted for credible information.
Believe it when you see it.
Now that we have social media, Twitter and other outlets give us up-to-the-minute information on the latest “rumors.” We hear that teams are “interested” in a particular player, or that organizations may have talked about a potential deal. Here is a good example. In this case the phrase “expected to talk” is used:
Mariners would be in playoffs if postseason started today. They're expected to talk with White Sox if Dunn, Ramirez, Viciedo available.
— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) June 25, 2014
Here’s the reality. GMs allegedly talk all the time. However, a GM is not going to give away a proven star under club control for a couple of Single-A pitchers just because the fans can dream about what that player would look like in their team’s uniform.
Does this mean that fans should boycott the Internet until after the trade deadline? Certainly not. If anything, these rumors can be incredibly entertaining and some of them will actually get done.
Just take each rumor with a grain of salt. As the days and weeks fly by, the rumors will really start to heat up.
Maybe one or two will actually come true. Imagine that.