This article is going to deal with some mild abstractions and a few shades of nuance so let’s get a declaration out there in the interest of meeting each other in peace and common ground:

I do not think Kris Bryant is a great baseball player. He is certainly nowhere near what he was at his ROY, MVP, World Series-winning peak from 2015-2017, and he may not represent a significant upgrade over anyone he would hypothetically replace on the current 2022 Mariners roster (although it seems likely he would be better than current 3B Eugenio Suarez). I did not come into the offseason particularly excited about Kris Bryant being a Mariner, and at no time have really thought it was anything more than a “well they have to sign SOMEBODY” level concept. I don’t think him signing with Colorado is a huge loss for the organization. 

That’s it. We good? We good. Ok let’s dive in.

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Yesterday afternoon Kris Bryant and the Colorado Rockies came together to pull off the unthinkable: By coming to terms on a 7 year, $182 million dollar contract they united the baseball landscape. Ken Rosenthal seemed aghast, Buster Olney propped himself out of Rob Manfred’s pocket long enough to wail for an entire industry, and Mariner fans – a nasty, filthy hive of miscreants prone to backbiting and petty grudges, came together in agreement to say collectively “thank God our baseball team didn’t do that.” Hell even I, someone who has spent years decrying how MLB at large and the Mariners very specifically do business, agreed. 

I woke up this morning, a day later, and my first thought I had was “Why in the hell do I care about Kris Bryant’s contract?” 

The modern age of baseball is filled to the brim with conditioning fans to care about stuff that happens off the field; CBA negotiations, international slot money, Super Two status, Rule V drafts, and etc. These various gears, levers, and labor-related tools serve to construct the walls and roof of the system under which Major League Baseball operates, and since we all are passionate consumers of Major League Baseball we in turn care about the environment in which it operates. I get it. We want the lay of the land. A map is helpful to know where you are, and where you’re going.

A problem with this knowledge, particularly when considered in the broader sociological era in which we exist, is teams know fans know how their sport works, and they use it for messaging. “This system is patently unfair and inequitable, therefore rather than continue to run uphill we will #disrupt this industry through a series of paradigm-shifting exploitations of market inefficiencies. Go team.” As fans we’ve eaten this up. Labor exploitation looks great when Brad Pitt is doing it, after all. We’ve fully bought into the idea that a team like the Oakland A’s just cannot be expected to compete with a team like the New York Yankees without desperately saving every single penny they possibly can, and those pennies just so happen to almost always come from the player’s pocket. That’s just how the narrative says it has to be.

The sport has conditioned us as fans for decades to view such edge case maneuvering, labor wage suppressing, and back room shiftiness to not only be necessary for many teams to compete but perhaps even virtuous and morally superior to the Texas Rangers simply saying “Marcus Semien and Corey Seager kick ass at baseball so we’ll just give them gobs of money (but nowhere even approaching the gobs of money we have) to come play for our team.

And so we arrive, once again at Kris Bryant and his ludicrous-seeming contract from the Colorado Rockies. If we believe the Mariners had targeted Bryant as a worthy addition to the roster (and every indication was that they were very much targeting him) then we believe they thought he would improve their team. What is it, then, about the terms of the contract that makes us, as fans and consumers, so grateful our team did not match them? The Mariners have almost no serious financial commitments beyond Robbie Ray (who has an opt out in three years any way). They have not made the playoffs in 20 years. There is no reason to believe the team is going to shift away from the way it has done business literally 98% of its history and begin annually snapping up free agent talent in a fashion where pre-existing commitments would act as an inhibitor so improvement. What would years 5-7 of Kris Bryant have actually meant to the 2026-2028 Seattle Mariners, beyond them achieving whatever win-loss record they were to achieve slightly less efficiently?

A quick thought exercise: In the winter of 2015-2016, Jerry Dipoto’s first offseason with the Mariners, the Baltimore Orioles signed 1B/DH Chris Davis to a massive, 7-year, $161 million dollar extension. It has been arguably, from a team perspective, the worst contract ever. Davis has posted -2.5 fWAR over the terms of the deal. He hasn’t even played since 2020. Since 2018 his highest wRC+ is 58. Imagine Evan White, with no defense, making $23 million a year. 

For the purposes of discussion imagine that, way back in 2015, Dipoto is hankering to make a splash. He wants to announce his intention to get the Mariners to the next level. Somehow he talks ownership into greenlighting that Davis contract, and the slugger comes to Seattle on those same exact terms. Chris Davis would now be entering his final season under contract with the Mariners. What, as a fan of the team, would have been different from then until now? The team would have still been blown up after 2018. They still would have not made the playoffs. They still would have rebuilt the farm, traded Robinson Cano, found a 1B solution at long last in Ty France, etc. For emphasis: It is highly likely the Mariners would largely be in the same place today as they already are even if they had spent the past six seasons carrying maybe the worst contract in the history of the sport, John Stanton would just have slightly less money.

It’s with this in mind that I recant my view on Kris Bryant. If the Mariners wanted him they should have signed him, whatever the cost. If there are other free agents they want (Trevor Story, Carlos Correa) they should sign them at whatever cost is necessary. We know they wanted Marcus Semien and Seiya Suzuki. They should have given them whatever it took. There is no virtue in winning without spending, and the idea that saving money now to spend later is real has just been spectacularly demonstrated to be false by the 2019-2022 Mariners. 

Caring about contracts is a false canard, a Trojan Horse through which MLB has managed to sway fan opinion away from labor to management. I am rooting for my team to get better, and to win. When contractual obligations and expenses prohibit them from doing that beyond any realm but the hilariously abstract, I will start caring about player salary. I imagine I will be waiting awhile for that to happen. Until then, make a great baseball team, and damn the cost.

Go M’s.