Surprising news: The Seattle Mariners trade their most talented player to another weak baseball team.

Over the following month, a number of teams may either fade, sell off their best players and control the trade market or go on a run to get into contention.

Get ready. There are still some teams whose futures appear hazy, and the MLB trade deadline is in only 40 days. Shopping? Vendo? How about neither? The clubs on the bubble are shown here.

Guardians of Cleveland
As it did the previous year, Cleveland could easily win the AL Central. The club is now one game behind Minnesota, which is not exactly an invincible juggernaut, even though it hasn’t been in first position since early April.

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Conversely, though, this division is so poor that winning it doesn’t really matter. Even if the Guardians easily win the division, it seems doubtful that an offense like theirs could go on any type of meaningful run; hence, they might decide to sell.

It could be difficult to turn down a trade given the desire in a player such as Shane Bieber, who will become a free agent before 30. In a market short on top-notch starters, he would easily produce an outstanding return. (Bieber is in the top five in MLB in innings per start and has an ERA+ of 118, even in an unusually bad year by his standards.)

A significant sell-off for the Guardians appears improbable in any case. Dealing with Bieber or any other member of this pitching staff, though, seems rather feasible. even if they are in first place.

Things go well occasionally and wrongly at other times. The Mariners didn’t have a great decade of swinging deals. Still, things may have turned much worse.

The good news first. Luckily, Seattle did not swing any trades this decade that called for an over-spiked cocktail and a huge dunce cap. There was no World War III since Bill Bavasi did not possess the nuclear codes this time. Positively, nobody let Woody Woodward swing for the fences once more.

It was bad in any case. Large-money veterans anchoring the payroll and large amounts of money spent on free agents have dominated the headlines for the last 10 years. There were a few large transactions, to be sure, but most of the time trades were completed at large volume with little to no discernible result for either party.

We need to set some guidelines for evaluating a trade before we start. Seattle will be given credit for the fWAR a player gained after being acquired by the Mariners when analyzing the talent transferring hands. Only controllable years will be tallied in terms of what the team gave up in a deal. If a player is traded in the middle of their contract, Seattle will only be penalized for the years of the contract with the new team. In a similar vein, only the years a player still had controllable pre-arb and arbitration years remaining would have counted against the Mariners. It will not be assumed for this exercise that any players will receive extensions. Money won’t be an object in this examination when it comes to extensions, either. A payroll addition or reduction makes no difference. Just production matters here.

Furthermore, it should be mentioned that the majority of these trades aren’t completed goods. A number of these transactions are still coming to pass and will throughout the future years as well. For instance, the Hanigura agreement is obviously still undefined. Though that holds up over time, Seattle presently has a 1.6 fWAR lead in the agreement. Marte looks to be an MVP candidate and has many years of controllability ahead of him.