The New York Mets showed they learned the right lesson from the Robinson Canó contract. Will the Mariners?
The Juan Soto mega-deal highlights how far Seattle is from the sport’s biggest contenders, but also how they’re foolishly holding themselves back.
The New York Mets are intimately familiar with the possibilities of Robinson Canó. When the Kings of Queens took on Canó in the Edwin Díaz and Jarred Kelenic trade, they validated many of us who’ve covered MLB in the past decade: no contract is truly untradable. In the wake of the Juan Soto contract, which blots out Canó’s 10-year, $240m stunner with (after a decade of inflation) 15 years, $765m to take the 2-line train from the Bronx to Queens. The other lesson that the Mets appear to have learned is one that clubs like the San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies have taken to heart. A lesson the Seattle Mariners continue to ignore to their own detriment. That is, for teams who can develop young talent internally, there is not the same risk of extended periods of non-competitiveness, even when a player being paid highly begins to see their performance decline.
In other words, 54% is a goal because the Mariners, at the ownership level and perhaps even at the front office level, are some combination of too fearful and too cheap to aim higher. I won’t bother with a litany of caveats. If you are literate and cared to open this article, you know Mariners ownership is not as wealthy as Steve Cohen and that the Mariners are not as valuable as some of the biggest market/storied franchises in the sport. You can swiftly find plenty I’ve written criticizing M’s ownership for their impotent competitive drive while praising the organization for assembling the most successful player development engine in the franchise’s history. What’s happened, however, is that an organization still viewing the Canó contract as a failure is not one able to efficiently pursue or maintain excellence.
In fear of being locked into another player’s contract without their production matching their compensation, Seattle has famously eschewed or failed to finish the deal on numerous high-profile free agent races. Some, like Trevor Story or Kris Bryant, have been reliefs, while others, like Marcus Semien, Carlos Correa, or Xander Bogaerts would have quite likely pushed Seattle to 1-3 more playoff berths over the past few seasons. While the front office and ownership group have made it known their disinterest in aging stars, they also put a swift kibosh on any assumptions that they’d try to lure the 26 year old Soto to Seattle. They’ve similarly made no indication of effort towards folks like Correa (27 in 2022), nor Manny Machado or Bryce Harper (26 in 2019). Even on their ideal terms, the organization’s terror of trying again leaves them at the mercy of those who aspire for more.
The Mets are, in many ways, a perfect example of the risks of trying. The years of Canó did little for them, with a familiar 86-76 finish in 2019 falling short of the playoffs, before the 2020 season’s mediocrity and a 77-85 2021 campaign that came ahead of massive changes. New York went big, signing Max Scherzer and riding their recently extended superstar Francisco Lindor alongside a homegrown core to 101 wins. Yet they floundered in the playoffs, and floundered again in 2023 despite adding Justin Verlander on another high-cost deal. trading Verlander+Scherzer at the deadline brought the Mets three Top-100 prospects.
Had the veterans been worse, they might have brought less, of course, but the Mariners are well aware of that. Their signing of Robbie Ray was not disastrous, but it didn’t pan out as hoped, and they dealt the southpaw for cash relief in the form of Anthony DeSclafani and Mitch Haniger. Had they desired, they could have also gone the route the organization did with Evan White and Marco Gonzales, lashing Jarred Kelenic’s remaining promise to their contracts like a 2008 stock trader with a subprime mortgage to clear up cash. But Seattle’s own deals have not proven immutable, while the potential for success is obvious by their margins of failure.
It’s a wasteful and pathetic way to operate, obsessively clearing costs instead of accepting them as a means to boost the organization’s chances of success, reputation, value, and perhaps even worthiness of ownership’s coveted sponsorship partnership. But that’s what the Seattle Mariners are already, albeit at a level too low to give themselves the odds of consistent playoff appearances (and revenues) that several other organizations have figured out is worth their time. Blessedly for fans and the Mariners, Seattle continues developing prospects at a healthy clip, which means they can give away talent to other clubs to pay off the contracts they sign. In essence, in lieu of having to hope their prospects all develop at a blue chip rate, if a signing goes awry, they have seen and shown that moving on from higher paid talent is far from impossible. And if a player actually lives up to their billing or exceeds it, like Nelson Cruz or, yes, Canó during his time w/Seattle, the M’s can burst past their Wild Card ceiling at last.