Marinating in Seattle

Q. When should you alter your three-year rebuilding plan?
A. Definitely not midway through year one.

With their beloved but woeful Mariners above .500 and in the thick of the AL West and wild card races, Seattle fans are asking whether they should be buyers or sellers before the trading deadline. If GM Jack Zduriencik is asking himself that question, he was the wrong replacement for the train wreck that preceded him.

I'm betting that Zduriencik recognizes instead that the Mariners are a long way from contention and should not be mortgaging their future for high-priced rentals. This is a team that has just three good hitters, one of whom is hurt and another of whom is enjoying his career year. (The third, Ichiro, is back to his old magic and stirring in a soupcon of power too.) The team has been swept along on a wave of solid pitching, but finishing '09 with 81 wins would be an achievement.

The best evidence that Zduriencik understands this was his signing of the ghost of Ken Griffey Jr. Playing an injury-addled former great in order to woo fans is a luxury that only a team with no hope can afford. Predictably, Junior is batting .218 and limping around left field. Imagine a team in a pennant race trotting out a baseball card every night and enduring his replacement-level play.

The Mariners have a wonderful opportunity to trade good veterans in their walk years and reap some future gold. Take Russ Branyan, please, and send back a couple of potential sticks. Until the past 300 at-bats, Branyan was a strikeout machine with no position. This year he's hitting .303 with an OPS of 1.009 in a tough-hitting park while playing first base full time. At 33, he won't be around when the Mariners start contending, so they ought to shop him before he hits the discount rack.

Ditto Jarrod Washburn, who can give someone 100 more innings of 4.00 ERA. But at 35, his future is now, and with his contract expiring, Seattle should get some hitting in return. They'd like to do the same for Eric Bedard. Hey, maybe they could convince Baltimore to relinquish Adam Jones, George Sherrill and three minor leaguers for...oh, nevermind. That would reverse the transparently moronic swap engineered by then-GM Bill Bavasi last year. Having milked Bedard for a season-and-a-half of All-Star caliber visits to the Disabled List, the Mariners can only hope now to reel in a fraction of that value for him now. And by "now," I mean "if and when he comes off the DL and pitches well enough to sucker some contender into thinking he can make seven starts in a row."

That win-now-without-talent approach got Bavasi fired and sunk the Mariners to 101 losses in '08. Zduriencik won't make the same mistake. This year, the Mariners are sellers. But if they follow the plan, the future will be brighter.
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Worse Prospects Than Chief Seattle

Pity poor Jack Zduriencik. It's bad enough no one outside Wroclaw (pronounced: Vrots-waff) can identify him correctly within three consonants. The Seattle Mariners GM now has the unenviable task of trying to build a contender against an improving division without the minor benefit of cash or talent.

Last year when the M's picked up Eric Bedard and his medical chart, I questioned whether they had enough lumber to contend even with him. Ha! This team hasn't even a sapling.

The peak of Marinerdom is an aging Ichiro, who, without the support of power or walks, is fast approaching offensive irrelevance. Other than his base stealing proficiency, he's an empty .310 hitter.

Oh, but wait, Raul Ibanez is a nice player. Yup, and for someone else in 2009. He's a free agent, and unless he loves coffee, rain and the Space Needle, he'll skedaddle to a team that has a snowball's chance in hell to contend, like anyone else in the Majors.

After that, there's Adrian Beltre, a free agent after '09, Jose Lopez, a second-baseman with one good year tucked in his belt, and a sucking black hole on offense. Besides these four, the entire rest of the team was 30 runs worse than a team of Triple-A players. Put another way, Mets back-up outfielder Angel Pagan, who batted .275 with no homers and 12 RBI in 105 plate appearances, was alone worth three more wins to his team, than the entire Mariners roster combined outside the aforementioned quartet.

Seattle might have a reasonable rotation next year. And it might not. Felix Hernandez should continue to excel. Jarrod Washburn may or may not defy predictions that he's over like Hootie and the Blowfish. Bedard might make more than 15 starts. And Carlos Silva might suddenly learn how to miss bats, but that would be counting on a guy with a 6.46 ERA and four strikeouts a game in '08.

The Mariners could decide to convert effective relievers like Ryan Rowland-Smith and Brandon Morrow into starters, but that would deplete the only asset the team has. Still, given the team's utter hopelessness, it's probably worth the risk.

Here's the real problem: former GM Bill Bavasi sunk $80 million into this pile of flotsam and jetsam, leaving Zduriencik with little room to maneuver. He could swap out Beltre and Washburn for some young players and hope the largely barren farm sprouts some tasty treats real fast. But it's looking as if the long, dreary winter in Seattle will last all the way through next Fall.