Bad vibes only: Mariners trade Eugenio Suárez in salary dump

Looks like Luis Urías is your Opening Day third baseman.

It would’ve been easy to miss but single-game tickets for your 2024 Seattle Mariners went on sale yesterday. It will cost you at least $60 to acquire one face value ticket for Opening Day. Today, the M’s traded Eugenio Suárez to shed his $11 million salary in 2024 and the $2 million buyout on his 2025 club option.

Good times.

An offseason that started quite bad has not trended positively from there. Where we last left off, the Mariners were almost surely out on Ohtani for financial reasons and we’d yet to hit, at least here, on the trade for Luis Urías.

I was initially quite annoyed at the Urías move because I believed the Mariners already had quite enough players who, if it went right, might be a serviceable utility bat worth 2-3 wins but if it went wrong—as it very much did for Urías in 2023—was unplayable on a contending club.

Given time, though, I’d come to grips with having Urías as a slight improvement to the bench—a step up, albeit an incremental one, on Dylan Moore, José Caballero and Sam Haggerty. So long as he wasn’t handed a full-time role, but instead maxed out as a caddy for Josh Rojas at second and occasionally spelled Geno at third, it wouldn’t be so bad.

Whoops! It is so bad.

From Daniel Kramer, in his piece on the trade, which nets the Mariners backup catcher Seby Zavala and right-handed relief project Carlos Vargas.

It also paves the way for Luis Urías, who Seattle acquired on Friday from the Red Sox, to become the everyday third baseman, according to a source familiar with the club’s thinking. Urías, who is coming off an injury-plagued down season after two productive years in Milwaukee, was expected to be non-tendered by Boston before the deal manifested.

Man, just—this stinks.

This was my and many others’ concern when the initial Urías trade went down, that it might mean Geno was on his way out for cost-saving reasons. I didn’t want to worry about that because it seemed borderline preposterous to have a player like Urías penciled into a corner infield spot on Opening Day for a club with supposed World Series aspirations but, well, here we are.

I’m not going to do some deep dive into Urías or Zavala or Vargas right now, the last two because I think it’d be insulting to try to put lipstick on a trade obviously done to shed payroll obligations. Also, it’s Thanksgiving Eve, Urías isn’t interesting enough and FanGraphs already has as good a primer as you’ll find on where he stands heading into 2024.

The natural reaction is, well, first it’s anger. That’s obvious. But after that, as a fan, you want to think “Well, they have to be clearing money for something. There has to be some big move coming after this.”

I want to think that, too.

Here’s the deal—there could be another big move. Like, maybe they do sign Blake Snell and pull off a blockbuster move for Juan Soto to, like Lloyd Christmas and the moped, totally redeem themselves. But there doesn’t have to be a big move coming.

And this iteration of the Seattle Mariners hasn’t given this fan base any reason to expect one.

It’s one trade. After another blegh trade that was also just one trade.

This is all starting to feel a bit beyond the pale—that this is just how it’s going to be going forward. Post-Nintendo Mariners ownership is telling us, without a shred of hesitancy, that maximizing profits is the top priority for the organization and if they can get a little bit cheaper by only getting a little bit worse, they will do it time and time again.

I’m here again, right after expressing as much in the Ohtani post, having a tough time wrapping words around how soul-crushingly brutal this all feels. We cheer for the pre-Peter Seidler Padres. A slightly more profitable Pirates. The Orioles without all the young talent. The Rockies if they won more. The Guardians in a tougher division.

The Seattle Mariners are also-rans, a second-rate franchise that hopes to get lucky in the process of printing money—that’s what they’re telling us.

But we sit here and hope. Because you have to hope in sports. That’s the whole point. We hope, like in life, there’s some greater meaning behind maddening developments. But in this thing that’s supposed to be an escape, for fans and the owners, it’s more of the same bullshit billionaire greed that’s poisoning everything else in the world.

So many folks have said it but it truly is astounding to sit here now 13 months removed from a time when this organization and its front office had us in the palm of their hands. The drought was over, the young talent was here and you could see, with a bit of investment, they could be one of the best teams in the sport for at least half a decade. It could be a run like we’ve never seen.

Since then, they’ve backed us over with the 7 Series that is The Baseball Club Of Seattle, LLLP and told us we were lucky to have tire marks across our calves.

“Yes, we are getting worse. No, we don’t care. Yes, that will be 40 percent more to come watch us in the building you taxpayers paid half a billion for.”

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

This isn’t some disaster of a trade. It’s not this move alone that has folks upset. It’s the flagrant disrespect for how much the Seattle Mariners mean to us and how much we want them to win.

I’ll keep saying it—this could all work out. They could make a big move. Maybe they are clearing space for trades and signings that push them towards their first American League pennant. Maybe.

But every time I say it, I feel more stupid—more insulted, more foolish, more of a mark.

Maybe—just maybe,

Maybe this is all it’s ever gonna be.