The context is what’s important here, and also what many people are asking you to ignore. So let’s review:

 About 32 hours ago the Seattle Mariners completed arguably the signature victory of the Jerry Dipoto Era. After falling behind 7-0 to Houston, the Mariners’ merry band of Club Controlled Assets stormed all the way back to win 11-8, capped by a no-doubt grand slam by real-life Human Talisman Dylan Moore, who sent the fanbase and dugout into the kinds of happy hysterics this franchise hasn’t seen since Ichiro was telling home plate to suck it.

It was a signature moment; the kind of play that recalls the long-ago glories that suckered my generation into loving this team, and one able to create a new generation of suckers fans. The Mariners had won four straight games against teams ahead of them in the division. They were one game out of a playoff spot. Despite a roster construction that only begrudgingly acknowledged the need to play out the season, they had forced management’s hand. They were going to add talent at the deadline, and make a push for the franchise’s first postseason birth in a generation. The fanbase was a powder keg of untapped love and loyalty, ready to explode.

It’s in this environment that the Mariners asked both their fans and players to grapple with trading away Kendall Graveman, the closer with a sub-1.00 ERA and by every account one of the most beloved players in the clubhouse. The knife got a special Dipoto twist by making  Houston the trade partner. In exchange the Mariners received  Abraham Toro, a former prospect whose MLB production fits right in with this Mariners’ lineup (NOTE: Not a compliment to Abraham Toro).

The baseball merits of the trade are certainly valid. Graveman is a free agent after the season, a pitcher with spotty health, and new to relief pitching. A few dozen innings of Kendall Graveman in exchange for 4.5 years of Abraham Toro is, we’ve told over and over in the Moneyball Era, just a smart trade. However, the cold and clinical way in which the trade was executed (the players apparently found out about the trade from Graveman and social media) combined with both the timing and trade partner ask, once again, for Mariner fans to endure an extremely high level of emotional pain at the expense of, perhaps, seeing their team mildly improved.

To be blunt it shouldn’t be this difficult. If Mariners’ management doesn’t believe the play of this team warrants trading future assets for significant big league improvement in 2021 that’s perfectly understandable. There is no one who would argue the team isn’t extremely fortunate to have its record be what it is. However trading from the very heart of the bullpen, the only chewing gum on a roster full of bailing wire, to the hated division rival you literally just galvanized an entire region by defeating, for a look-sideways-and-pretend-you’re-a-genius-to-make-it-look-good-in-the-future addition is dipping into an emotional account already enormously overdrawn.

That Jerry Dipoto didn’t even bother defending the merits of the trade on their own but rather asked fans to form a trust circle, put on their imagineering caps and leap headlong yet again into the glorious future he has planned for us all is further indictment on the inability of this team to exist in the real world in any competent fashion. Time and time and time again we see them act in a way that reveals some combination of ignorance and indifference to how they are perceived by fans and their own players. Such a blind spot would perhaps be tolerable were they producing regular division titles and league championship contenders but, well, they most emphatically are not doing that.

There are large swaths of the baseball community, whether vanguard leaders of the sabermetric movement, or modern day would-be apostles of the Gospel of Efficiency, happy to align with the front office on this trade. Tied to this alignment, almost always, is the same casual disdain and indifference towards how fans and players feel. This alignment of voice and institution has led to baseball fans carrying an enormous load in order to root for their own team. Every transaction, every decision to keep an elite prospect in AAA to preserve service time, every move to shed an organization of long-time employees, fans are expected to view from the wizened lens of management. Simply wanting your baseball team to be good and fun in the here and now and, theoretically, forever into the future is viewed as simplistic and naive, if not flat out mocked as stupid and ignorant.

It doesn’t have to be this hard, nor should it be. There is nothing ignorant or stupid about wanting your team to win, ever. It’s not nearly as hard as MLB teams would like you to think it is, and certainly not as hard as the Mariners have made it on themselves over the years. An organization built with winning as the fundamental pillar upon which it exists, and from which flows a deep respect and understanding of the role fans play in the unique and, at times, beautifully symbiotic way in sports wouldn’t blindside those fans and their own players the way both were yesterday. You are what you do and time and again the Mariners’ actions reveal themselves as tone deaf and uncaring towards anyone and anything outside of their own small circle of self-interest.

The team can of course still salvage this with a few more trades and a Wild Card appearance. The bar a sports team needs to clear to earn love and support from fans is and always has been preposterously low. Perhaps that’s why it seems to attract such a low-leaping group of individuals to its ownership and executive positions. But until they bunny hop over that bar I encourage fans to believe that the Mariners are who they tell you who they are, and to not let anyone try and tell you you’re stupid for finding who they are to be acceptable. It shouldn’t have to be this hard.