It has been a long while since I devoted any serious time to thinking about the Seattle Mariners. This year was one of the more entertaining postseasons in my recent memory, and it was refreshing to sink into baseball games where I didn’t necessarily have an intimate knowledge of the trials and tribulations of a team’s backup backup catcher, or the monthly splits of their September-callup reliever. But now the 2018 season is through, that capitalistic hunting season that is free agency has begun again, and so my thoughts must settle back on the Mariners.
As has been extensively covered, the Mariners are facing 2019 with three “simple” options:
Neither of those paths are particularly straightforward, but for the purposes of this exercise and to avoid giving you a Viva El Birdos-level introductory treatise, we’ll leave ‘em as-is.