A King's Ransom?

Earlier this morning Ken Rosenthal made a compelling case for the Mariners to trade Felix Hernandez to the Yankees:

The Mariners need players. Lots of players. The prospects they would get for Hernandez would join Pineda, second baseman Dustin Ackley and first baseman Justin Smoak to form an impressive young core.

There aren't words for how bad the 2010 Mariners were. Furthermore, despite a few promising prospects there is very little reason for optimism for the next few seasons. So what to do? There is no urgent need to trade Hernandez as he is under contract until 2014 and although he will make more than $20 million a year for the final 3 years of his contract the Mariners aren't in dire need of cash or payroll strapped.  So the pressing question is whether or not the Mariners are better with or without Hernandez?


In the past I have been reluctant to trade away star pitchers as I thought they are far more difficult to replace than star hitters. The exception always being when contracts are expiring and teams have no hope for resigning said player in the future. These days I think it is possible to overvalue the contributions of just one player to a team's success. The Jays won 85 games last year without Halladay, the Mariners won 116 games the year after A-Rod left, etc. I don't really think there are irreplaceable players anymore. If you can make a deal for four-five good players than I think you have to make it.

So do the Yankees have a package that could interest the Mariners? I don't think so. They didn't have enough to land Cliff Lee last year so it is hard to imagine what has changed since then. In the meantime we can look forward to see if its possible to win a Cy Young with less than 10 wins.