Juan Soto, Pete Alonso, and Paul Goldschmidt are bad ideas for the Seattle Mariners
The Mariners need lineup help, but this isn't the way.
Regardless of where the Seattle Mariners rank in payroll or their stance on elite free-agent contracts, paying the freight for big-ticket, one-year fixes are not only a bad idea, but absolute worst path the club could take this winter.
Three names keeps popping up in this conversation: Juan Soto, Pete Alonso, and Paul Goldschmidt. They aren’t all the same player, and the trade cost would likely be quite different for each of the three, but at the end of the day Jerry Dipoto and Justin Hollander should Just Say No.
The big disconnect seems to be the idea of a contract extension for the player before or after a winter transaction is completed. Pre-trade extensions are essentially no longer a thing in Major League Baseball. I can’t even remember the last time something like that occurred. As for a post-trade agreement, while its certainly plausible, bypassing a shot at free agency and the chance to choose where to play the rest of their careers seems like a significant long shot, especially considering how close such an opportunity is.
Pete Alonso, 1B — New York Mets
I’m not all that confident in Alonso’s future at this point, anyway, so a long-term extension with any club might be dicey. He could keep chugging along, hitting .250 with walks and 40-homer power for another 3-5 years, or he could prove 2023, when he batted just .217 with an increase in strikeouts was a harbinger.
Alonso will be 29 in December, so a pure age-related concern isn’t fair or accurate, but it is reasonable to ask what he’s worth. At his very best he’s been a 3-4 win first baseman who has one way to impact the game.
His fall in 2023 (54 points in average, 34 points in OBP), may prove to be an outlier. But his performance versus anything non-fastball took a significant hit last season. Sliders (.223 AVG, 40% whiff), changeups (.225 AVG, 42% whiff), curveballs (.219 AVG, 22% whiff), sweepers (.192 AVG, 34% whiff), and splitters (0-for-16, 52% whiff) were the slugger’s kryptonite.
Alonso just hired Scott Boras, too, probably increasing his chances of testing free agency and putting the chances of a non-elite, high-market extension as out of reach as it can be. He’s set to make over $20 million
Considering the considerable risk of it being a one-year fix, and the fairly large piece of the payroll pie his salary would eat, why trade significant, controllable pieces to the Mets? We’ll get back to that.
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Paul Goldschmidt, 1B — St. Louis Cardinals
Goldschmidt, the 2022 National League MVP, saw his production fall in 2023, too, and not just from his MVP season. Not that a .268/.363/.447, 25 HR, 122 wRC+ season isn’t good, but it’s certainly not great, and at age 36, any club trading for Goldschmidt has to wonder if this is the start of a legitimate decline — not that he’s automatically faling completely off a cliff, but perhaps there aren’t a bunch more 140 wrC+ seasons left to extract from his bat.
Goldschmidt, who has full no-ttrade protection (!), is owed $22 million next season, plus he’s still due the final two signing bonus payments totalling $4.5 million. That’s a $26.5 million payroll investment, plus a significant trade package.
If Goldschmidt somehow approved a trade to Seattle one would think the club would have an outside chance to get him to stay longer. But he’ll be a 37-year-old free agent. How much is that worth in trade and extension money,? It’s a very dangerous, slippery slope in managing the present and future of the organization, considering the return is so short and potentially mediocre, relative to the trade cost.
Juan Soto, OF — San Diego Padres
Soto is arbitration eligible one final time and is projected by Matt Swartz to earn $33 million for 2024. That’s such a hefty number, the highfalutin Padres are considering trading Soto rather than carrying him next season.
Salary aside, for 2024 anyway, Soto can help solve a lot of problems for a lot of teams. He’s just turning 25 and in the worst season of his career he was 43% better than the league average bat. “Great!” you might say. “Go get him!”
Hey, I agree. When he hits free agency, go hand him $400 million. But trading for him is going to cost dearly — more than Alonso and Goldschmidt, and perhaps more than both combined, since there’s no performance risk or injury history.
Soto, also a Boras client, is going to max out his value one way or the other, and even if the Mariners were willing to offer market value the chances he takes their money, especially prior to a trip down Free Agency Lane, is as close to zero as it can possibly get.
Even for one year of Soto, the Mariners would certainly have to beat multiple other offers, strongly suggesting Jim Bowden’s idea of Bryce Miller and either Harry Ford or Gabriel Gonzalez is certain to be light, not to mention the Padres may very much prefer more big-league talent in return.
Whatever the cost, it’d be at least in the neighborhood of what a year and two months of Luis Castillo cost them in 2022. I know what some of you are thinking. “Hey, Churchill, they extended Castillo after trading for him!”
They did. And the Atlanta Braves did it with both Sean Murphy and Matt Olson. Murphy and Olson, however, had no leverage. They were years from free agency. Technically, Castillo had another year, too — he signed his extension in late September of 2022.
None of us are idiots here. We know clubs do the whole backchannel whispering to measure interest. But we don’t need to do that with Alonso, a Florida-born player who has spent his entire life in the east, Goldschmidt, whose age is a significant concern when talking long-term extension, and especially Soto, who is likely to command the largest free-agent deal of all-time, unless Shohei Ohtani bests it this offseason.
The chances Seattle would be trading for one year of each of these players is exceedingly high — higher than it would be for some other clubs — and the trade cost has almost no shot to match the control years and overall value brought for that one season. That’s generally the way it works with stars one year from the jackpot. It’s why clubs make them available.
Soto, Alonso, and Goldschmidt are simply bad ideas for Seattle. They likely won’t be around for more than one season, and will come with extensive salaries and very high trade costs.
And as much as fans may not like it, the club won’t make up for the lack of development and trade options by spending with the elite bankrolls in baseball. Hate it all you want, but it’s reality. Making trades like this ends up putting even more pressure on the draft, sign, and develop plan to produce impact players, reduces the margin for error, and generally makes the goal more difficult to achieve. Why? Because in a year the club is right back where they were, with fewer resources this time. Yep, it’s all about maximizing resources.
Furthermore, it’s generally the last type of move a smart club should make when building into a World Series contender. See: Dodgers, Los Angeles, re: Trea Turner, Max Scherzer, and Astros, Houston, re: Justin Verlander. It’s a cherry on top, not how you acquire impact core pieces. If the Mariners get to that point, I’ll have an entirely different stance on trades of this nature.
It’s worth noting, however, this isn’t necessarily the case for all players in their walk years, and there are a slew of players with two or more years until free agency that make a heckuva lot of sense to attempt to acquire via trade (extension or not), potentially including infielder Bo Bichette, outfielders Cedric Mullins and Luis Robert Jr., and right-handers Mitch Keller and Zac Gallen.
A case can be made for some of these players. Just not the aforemention trio.
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