Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
Over the weekend, news broke that the Diamondbacks are signing ace Corbin Burnes to a six-year deal worth $240 million. In Burnes’ last five seasons, he’s finished sixth, first, seventh, eighth and fifth in Cy Young voting. And he’s still just 30 years old. Yes, pitchers break, but Burnes is a big (6-foot-3, 245 pounds), strong dude and sure seems pretty sturdy. Basically, this was a move so many teams should have been interested in making.
Allow me to use this as a springboard to direct my ire at two contenders who should be doing more this offseason.
Any list of teams who should have signed Burnes starts with the Orioles and their maddening prospect hugger of a general manager, Mike Elias.
The Orioles have a new ownership group with a perfect opportunity to distinguish themselves as better owners than Peter Angelos. There’s hardly any payroll on the books moving forward. The big-league roster has a lot of talent, particularly among position players. The farm system is still loaded with position players. The rotation leaves something to be desired and, in particular, now lacks an ace.
The Orioles already missed out (again) on Garrett Crochet in the trade market. Their big free-agent pitcher so far is 35-year-old righty Tomoyuki Sugano. The frontline starters appear to be Zach Eflin and Grayson Rodríguez.
Meanwhile, one of the most extreme rebuilds in MLB history has yielded two playoff berths with zero playoff wins. They already backtracked by 10 wins last regular season, too.
Maybe Elias is just a builder of farm systems and needed to be replaced before last season. Maybe he’s desperately trying to get big pitching moves done and has failed on all except the trade for Burnes last spring. Maybe this new front office is a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” situation and wouldn’t allow Elias to offer the Burnes deal the D-backs offered.
Whatever it is, shame on the Orioles for not better addressing the top end of their rotation. The fans deserve better after going through those four years of hell.
Then again, hell can be defined in different ways as a sports fan. Is it losing 115 games and then 108 in back-to-back seasons like the Orioles did? Or is it better defined as constant tease jobs and half-measures with the front office justifying everything?
Hello, Jerry Dipoto and the Seattle Mariners.
“I think the misnomer, or maybe the thing I don’t think is fair, is that we’re not eons away,” Dipoto said during the winter meetings. “We are one of the better teams in the league. We go into each year forecast as a playoff team, and for three of the last four years, we’ve come up short. That’s on us. We need to do more. We need to figure out how to take that last step.”
I left in the last part where Dipoto was accountable to be fair to him. That’s good. He should say they want to take the next step and it’s good that he’s shouldering blame for the Mariners being the Mariners.
But, man, they go into each year forecast as a playoff team? That’s not even true, but even if it were, how does that mean anything at all?
Remember, Dipoto hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt with his comments in the past. He asked for “patience” from the fan base after missing the playoffs in 2023, noting that his goal was to build a bunch of teams that win 54% of their games (that’s an 87-win season).
The Mariners are one of five teams to never win the World Series. They are one of … um, one, to never play in the World Series. Yep, they are the only team that hasn’t even played in the Fall Classic.
They broke the longest MLB playoff drought in 2022 and advanced a round in the playoffs before losing to the eventual World Series champion Astros. They followed that up with a quiet offseason, though they did trade for Teoscar Hernández. They missed the playoffs in 2023 by a game. A series of moves were made, trading well-known names like Eugenio Suárez, Robbie Ray and Jarred Kelenic. They got Mitch Haniger back and signed Mitch Garver. They traded for Jorge Polanco. They let Hernández walk. They shook up the roster.
The 2024 Mariners went 85-77, missing the playoffs by one game again.
What have they done this offseason?
Nothing, really. Nothing of substance.
Maybe they’re counting on full seasons of Randy Arozarena and Victor Robles. And a much better season from Julio Rodríguez. Oh, and bounce-back seasons from Garver and J.P. Crawford. There’s a new manager in Dan Wilson and they finished 21-13 after he took over late in the season.
It just seems like there’s room to do more than talk about how you’re projected to be a playoff team every year. Wouldn’t Alex Bregman be a help here? Couldn’t they have signed Corbin Burnes and then spun at least one — if not two — members of that stellar rotation in a trade for position-player help?
There’s still time to make it a successful offseason.
It appears that more mediocrity is on the horizon for Seattle, and the loyal fans truly deserve better.