A big baseball trade went down yesterday. Even in a sport that has seen yet another offseason drag on interminably while management attempts to put a chokehold on player salaries, you’d be forgiven for missing it, what with an attempted coup taking place AND the NFL playoffs ramping up, all in the same week. 

In case you did miss it, The Cleveland Sorry About the Racisms traded all-world shortstop Francisco Lindor and quality starting pitcher Carlos Corrasco to the Mets. All it cost New York was two middle infielders who, while young (and more notably so, so cheap) have skill sets approximating Lindor’s after being xeroxed about 100 times, and a poo poo platter of young prospects who may or may not make their major league debut before the Great American Experiment goes kaput.

As a card-carrying, board-certified member of the Mariners Fans Who Like To Rouse Rabble Club I felt it worth noting that Seattle, newly flush with prospects and a payroll of $4.35 beyond this coming season, could have easily matched the package, bringing a proven starting pitcher and top 10 or so positional player in the sport to Seattle as they, by their own declaration, look to push for a playoff appearance in 2021.

They didn’t do that, of course. They haven’t really done much of anything this offseason outside of the now-standard flyer on a fringe starter, and a middle-innings reliever or two. There are reasons for this insistence on standing pat time and again; some are larger than even the team’s ownership itself, as the sport lurches further and further away from the illusion of being an entertainment product and ever closer to becoming a bank with 30 very expensive, tax-subsidized branches. 

Foremost among the reasons the Mariners do not engage in such illicit and scandalous affairs such as “getting really really good players” is because they are, well, the Mariners. Lindor is a free agent after the 2021 season, and any thought of the Mariners being able to re-sign him, even at market value, is met within the industry with either general, soft skepticism or outright disdain. Those kinds of transactions are for the sport’s gilded aristocracy; your Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, Nationals, and so on. It’s possible Seattle can toss enough cash at a free agent to convince them to come here (hello Canó), but the idea that a year in the Mariners organization will make a soon-to-be-hundred-millionaire more likely to stay in Seattle is, um, not thought likely.

That the team that actually acquired Lindor is one of the few that regularly competes with Seattle for the title of the sport’s premier ROFLCOPTER, the very same franchise whose recent epic bumbling allowed Jerry Dipoto’s front office to pivot away from stumbling towards a second Wild Card into a suddenly-long-planned-and-masterly-conceived rebuild is, of course, irrelevant. The Mets have a new owner, and a new lease on competitive relevance. The LOLMETS are no more and all it took was an owner who said “enough of this shit.”

The Mariners, seemingly, have not had enough of this shit. And until they do, they and their fans will never be party to the kind of franchise-altering moves the Mets made yesterday. They are who they are and have been through the power of their own inertia. They cannot be anything other than themselves, because to do so would require admitting that’s not ok. Until that admission comes, and the decision is made that being the sport’s least successful franchise year after year after year is unacceptable, acquiring players like Francisco Lindor will be nothing more than high-engagement thought exercises. Just another New Year’s Resolution, made in the throes of an alcohol-fueled optimistic haze, destined to be abandoned by mid-January. Same as it ever was.