Baltimore Orioles trade OF Taylor Ward to the Seattle Mariners for RHP Alex Hoppe, RHP Harrison Kreiling, and RHP Brock Moore.  The Mariners aren’t selling. Or at least, they aren’t just selling. After taking a series from Toronto on July 5, the team went on a 6-14 run that even the All-Star break couldn’t reset, falling to a season-worst five games under .500. The team then dealt Luis Castillo, which was a sale in technicality but not in spirit: the All-Star no longer fit in either Seattle’s rotation or the reputation he’d built with the club. That the move provided the front office with a surprising amount of financial flexibility was also, in itself, not a necessary indicator of anything. The M’s have embezzled that flexibility in the past, when trading Robinson Canó for Jarred Kelenic, and again when trading Marco Gonzales and Jarred Kelenic for Jackson Kowar. Financial flexibility is often where the modern “fan as armchair GM” thing tends to break down. There’s an appeal to having to manage, mentally, a baseball team under the constraints of a budget; limits beget creativity. But in the game of pretending to run a baseball team, there’s no intrinsic value in just pocketing money, and in real life, there’s a lot of it. That’s why the typical salary dump trade, like the Tyler Mahle deal, are the most demoralizing in sports. In a capped league, such moves theoretically create the potential for new moves, but generally they’re being done by the same people who made the bad acquisitions that needed to be dumped. In baseball, they’re nothing more than a non-apology, labeled as a “smart move.”

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