Mariners Trade Retrospective: How Mariano Rivera almost came to Seattle

We continue our series on the trades that almost changed the course of history for the Seattle Mariners. Today, we look at how the greatest closer in baseball history was almost a Mariner.

When you cover a team that has made over 100 trades the past 4 years, you aren’t exactly strapped for trade content. The Mariners and GM Jerry Dipoto have been very good to us in that way. But we don’t hear about most of the trades that are discussed. For the 100 or so trades Dipoto has made, there have likely been more than 500 discussed with varying degrees of likeliness.

But for this writer, I have always been fascinated by the deals that were discussed that never got done. I read through the chapter…