The Mariners just finished trading Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz to the Mets, but the club doesn’t appear to be done. Jerry Dipoto is never done. Ken Rosenthal has reported that shortstop Jean Segura could be the next Mariner to move, with the Phillies engaged as the trade partner. Former top-10 prospect J.P. Crawford is potentially part of the return. Bob Nightengale reported a deal had been agreed to involving at least those two players, while Jon Morosi indicated the deal was complete pending physicals, with Segura expected to waive his no-trade clause. And Bob Nightengale has further reported that Carlos Santana will join Crawford in Seattle, with other major leaguers and a prospect also involved.

While we don’t yet know all the players involved, the framework for the trade is an interesting one. Jean Segura headlined the Angels half of a trade that sent Zack Greinke from Milwaukee to Los Angeles more than six years ago. By the following All-Star Break, Segura looked like a star, with a 133 wRC+ and four wins in the first half of the season. He spent the next two and a half seasons as a replacement-level player, a period that included the tragic loss of his 9-month-old son in the middle of the 2014 season. Whether Segura just needed a change of scenery or more time to develop as a a player and a person, a trade to Arizona that sent Chase Anderson and Isan Diaz to Milwaukee led to Segura’s breakout 2016 campaign.

The Diamondbacks, in need of pitching, traded Segura and Mitch Haniger to Seattle for Taijuan Walker and Ketel Marte. At the time of the trade, both Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan presciently focused on Haniger, but Segura has been a good player in two seasons with the Mariners and earned a five-year, $70 million contract extension in 2017. He has $58 million left on the deal that runs through 2022 and includes a $17 million option for 2023. He’s a roughly average defensive shortstop with an above average hitting line predicated on putting the ball in play. At 29 years old next year, he’d likely be the third-best position player on the market this winter if he hadn’t signed his extension, and would be looking at anywhere from $60 to $90 million in free agent guarantees. His contract is a fair value, but does rebuilding Seattle little good.

Heading into 2017, J.P. Crawford was one of the top 10 prospects in baseball. A disastrous first month of the season was balanced by a very good summer, and he put up a 114 wRC+ over the remainder of the season before receiving a call-up. The uneven season moved Crawford down a little on the prospect ranks, but the Phillies still saw him as the shortstop of the future and traded Freddy Galvis. A strained right forearm and fractured left hand caused two month-long disabled list trips and stunted Crawford’s season. He ended up with just 138 plate appearances and too many strikeouts, though he still showed a little pop and a solid walk rate. The Phillies want to contend now and are opting for proven performance over potential. With Seattle in the exact opposite position, they can take time to see if the soon-to-be 24-year-old can live up to his lofty prospect status. Crawford doesn’t add to the Mariners growing list of solid prospects, but he does add another young player with the potential to help the team contend down the line.

What this does for the Phillies’ potential pursuit of Manny Machado is anyone’s guess, but Bob Nightengale is reporting they aren’t out on anyone yet after this potential move. We’ll have a full post if or when the deal goes final.

As of Saturday evening, the Mariners-Mets deal that will send Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz to Queens and a bevy of players to Seattle appears to be done, pending physicals. The trade is expected to be officially announced Monday, but the pieces are known. Below are scouting reports on the trio of prospects acquired by the Mariners, as well as thoughts on the new state of the Mariners system and their desired competitive timeline.

Jarred Kelenic, CF

Kelenic was ranked eighth on our 2018 pre-draft rankings, and 86th when we last updated our overall rankings. He (or Cardinals first rounder Nolan Gorman) was generally viewed as the top high school hitter available in the draft, and he was the first one taken at sixth overall.

Advanced bats don’t typically come out of Wisconsin, but Kelenic hit consistently throughout high school against the best pitchers in his peer group. Teams leaned heavily on their summer showcase looks at Kelenic because during the spring, he didn’t play high school baseball. Instead, he played for a travel ball team called Hitters, which played weekend double headers in Kenosha and Cedar Rapids against uneven competition.

Kelenic is a stocky, physically mature 19-year-old. He currently runs well enough and has sufficient instincts for center field, but it’s possible that he’s a better fit in a corner at some point, perhaps even in his early twenties. Even if he moves to a corner, he has enough hit/power to play every day, but Kelenic would probably have to develop a plus-plus bat to be a star away from center. Because his track record of hitting is so strong and he’s so technically proficient, he was considered one of the higher-probability bats from the 2018 class, though he also likely also comes with a narrower, relatively modest band of potential outcomes. He’s advanced enough in skill and age to begin 2019 in the South Atlantic League.

Justin Dunn, RHP

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While waiting for the main course of a possible Robinson Canó trade, Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto temporarily sated his trade-based appetites by sending relief pitcher Alex Colomé to the White Sox for catcher Omar Narváez.

For the White Sox, this trade, coupled with the rumors of the team’s real interest in some of this year’s top free agents, may imply something about when they see their competitive window opening.

Narváez was essentially the default option for the White Sox after the suprise 80-game suspension of Welington Castillo, stemming from his positive test for high levels of erythropoietin. A former Rule 5 pick from the Tampa Bay Rays, Narváez had been generally considered a defense-first catcher, well off the top prospect lists. But he could get on-base a bit, sort of like another former White Sox prospect, Mark Johnson, enough to make him mildly interesting and he was promoted quickly given that the catchers of interest in the organization were generally behind him chronologically. Narváez proved better than expected, and hit .275/.366/.429 for the White Sox, good for 2.1 WAR in just 322 plate appearances, which created an interesting dilemma for the team.

In the short-term, the White Sox had already invested in Castillo; in the longer-term, Narváez would have considerable pressure from the farm in the form of Zack Collins and Seby Zavala, neither of whom the team has thrown in the towel on as a catcher. Sure, you can keep Narváez around as a defensive caddy or a fallback if neither prospect ends up at catcher in the majors, but is that the best use of a resource? Narváez’s season makes him interesting for a rebuilding team at an earlier stage in the process, like the Mariners, who can afford to give him the at-bats needed to prove 2018’s improvement wasn’t a fluke.

Chicago’s bullpen is very thin at the moment after Nate Jones and Jace Fry, and with them having enough young talent that they could catch lightning in a bottle and compete in 2019 and 2020 (especially in the latter year), a pickup like Colomé for a catcher you might not be able to use as much as is ideal makes for an interesting swap. Colomé’s not an elite reliever, simply a solid one, and I don’t believe that there were any better prospects forthcoming given that the trade that originally brought him to the Mariners only fetched Tommy Romero and Andrew Moore. Even that trade needed Denard Span to make it happen. And if the White Sox don’t compete in either of the next two seasons, it’s an organization that has shown little reluctance to re-gift a relief pitcher.

The Mariners are clearly entering a rebuilding phase, so they have time to take a long look at Narváez. One thing I ride rebuilding teams for is when they don’t utilize roster spots to learn something useful about players, and there are things to learn when it comes to Narváez. In addition to assessing whether his 2018 122 wRC+ represents skill at the plate that’s here to stay, there are concerns about his defense; by Baseball Prospectus’ catcher defense metrics, he was worth -10.8 framing runs in 2018, after a 2017 that was almost as poor. Figuring out what Seattle has while they have time, before the wins matter as much again, is useful. David Freitas isn’t going to be the catcher when the Mariners are good again, and neither will some stopgap veteran signed to fill out the lineup for a year. If Narváez is good, the Mariners get three additional seasons of him after this one; if Jonathan Lucroy or Nick Hundley or Matt Wieters are good, they just get better paid in next year’s one-year contracts. Either way, it’s going to be a few years before finding playing time for Cal Raleigh, drafted in 2018, theoretically becomes a need.

There has been a fair bit of speculation in the last few days that the Mariners are preparing to move Robinson Cano to the Mets. Last night, most people went to bed expecting an announcement at some point today. Joel Sherman called the deal “near certain” to get done. Here’s his reported potential trade.

Mets Receive:

• Robinson Cano
• Edwin Diaz
• Some Cash

Mariners Receive:

• Jay Bruce
• Anthony Swarzak
• Jarred Kelenic
• Justin Dunn
• Gerson Bautista

On Tuesday, when I engaged in my own speculation and assessed Cano’s current trade value, I discussed how a deal with the Mets might look.

The reported potential framework of a deal involving Cano and $50 million going to the Mets comes close value-wise. The Mets are said to be trying to include Jay Bruce or receive Edwin Diaz or Mitch Haniger. There is a chance Cano could be packaged with Diaz or Haniger for some prospect return, but absent that, those two – particularly Haniger – don’t make sense to include as the Mariners try to rebuild; using those pieces to acquire talent for the Mariners next run at contention would seem to be a far better option than simply having to eat less money. As for Bruce and the $29 million owed to him over the next two seasons, that would likely need to come out of the money the Mariners are paying. Cano plus $30 million for Bruce is a deal that could make sense for both clubs. If the Mets were to insist on Diaz (the more likely supplemental piece to move) in the trade, New York would need to add prospects to the deal, essentially combining two separate trades into one.

Given what we know at this moment, separating this trade into two deals makes sense, so long as the rest of the money sent over to the Mariners is in the $20 million range. The first involves the Mets receiving Cano and whatever the Mariners don’t pick up of the $120 million he is due over the next five years. In turn, they move two contracts they no longer want. Anthony Swarzak is owed $8 million next season after a below replacement-level 2018 and Jay Bruce, who has been a replacement-level player since 2014 (with his pre-free agency 2017 the lone exception), is due $29 million. The Mariners sending somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 to $8 million annually from 2021 to 2023 would make this is a pretty reasonable deal for both sides, though it does lead to some questions about the Mets’ intentions, given both the other ways the club might have spent the money due to Cano and the fact that this trade is roughly salary neutral for the 2019 season, meaning that the Mets haven’t actually spent any more money yet.

Would they have been better off making the same salary commitment to A.J. Pollock, then signing a reasonably priced closer like David Robertson and keeping two of their best prospects? That’s the sort of question that comes with moves made by the Mets organization. Perhaps the club will now spend more money given that they’ve made two solid additions to the roster without adding any salary this season. According to Kiley McDaniel, the plan is to trade Noah Syndergaard — presumably to fill other holes cheaply — and then sign a free agent pitcher. That certainly doesn’t sound like a team getting ready to bust out after years of spending below their market.

As for second part, and arguably the more important part, of the trade, we see an elite reliever with four years of team control and a minimum salary in 2019 moved for a back-end top-100 prospect in first round pick Kelenic, a top-200 prospect in Justin Dunn, and a fungible reliever. The Mariners expressed resistance to the idea of trading Diaz earlier this offseason, but this is the sort of deal a rebuilding team should make given the lack of value their own team would receive on the mound in a losing season, and their need to replenish a depleted farm system.

This deal isn’t final yet. Will Trader Jerry continue his work on the farm? Will Brodie and Robbie reunite under the lights of the big city? Stay Tuned. We’ll have full trade analysis when the deal becomes official.

As we get closer to deals for Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, the time has come for warnings about mega-deals gone bad. You know about Albert Pujols, Chris Davis, Miguel Cabrera, and Jacoby Ellsbury as prime examples of why guaranteeing big money long-term to players on the wrong side of 30 is a bad idea. Robinson Cano’s current contract is not one of those examples. There were alarm bells when Cano signed his 10-year, $240 million contract with the Mariners five years ago, but he has more than held up his end of the contract by averaging more than four wins per season. If Cano hits his projections next year and continues a normal age-related decline, he could easily live up to the $240 million contract he signed.

Over the past five seasons, the Mariners have paid Cano just over $108 million and Cano, in turn, has delivered 20.7 WAR. According to our values at the bottom of Cano’s player page, his play has been worth around $160 million. He’s currently projected by Steamer for three wins next season. With standard aging curves, here is what Cano’s production and value are expected to be over the next five years.

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

All Edgar Martinez did was hit — the statement is almost entirely true in both the literal and figurative sense. Even after adjusting for his high-scoring surroundings, Martinez could flat-out rake. A high-average, high-on-base percentage hitting machine with plenty of power, his numbers place him among the top 30 or 40 hitters of all time even after adjusting for the high-offense era. Martinez played a key role in putting the Mariners on the map as an AL West powerhouse, emerging as a folk hero to a fan base that watched Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez lead the franchise’s charge to relevancy, then skip town for more lucrative deals. But while Griffey and Rodriguez were two-way stars at key up-the-middle positions and Johnson a flamethrowing ace, Martinez spent the bulk of his career as a designated hitter. In that capacity, he merely put a claim on being the best one in baseball history.

More than 40 years after it was introduced — in the most significant rule change since the AL adopted the foul strike rule in 1903 — the DH continues to rankle purists who would rather watch pitchers risk injury as they ineptly flail away (Bartolo Colon excepted). In 2004, Paul Molitor became the first player elected to the Hall after spending the plurality of his career (44% of his plate appearances) as a DH, while a decade later, Frank Thomas became the first elected after spending the majority of his career (57% of his PA) there. By comparison, Martinez took 72% of his plate appearances as a DH, while David Ortiz — whose 2016 victory lap spurred plenty of Hall of Fame discussion — took 88%.

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The headliner in the James Paxton deal is LHP Justus Sheffield. He’s been a top prospect for so long that it’s easy to find updated reports on him and understand where he falls in the prospects landscape. The short version is that he has an above-average-to-plus four-pitch mix, but his command ranges from average to below average, so he could still fit in a number of roles in the big leagues, ranging from multi-inning relief power arm to mid-rotation starter.

The more intriguing pieces of this deal are the other two names, RHP Erik Swanson and CF Dom Thompson-Williams. Neither were on the year-end version of THE BOARD, but both were on our radar; we intentionally didn’t comb through every 40 FV candidate in the in-season update since that’s what we focus on in the winter.

If we were doing the Mariners list today, both would be 40 FVs; they’re good examples of guys who sneak up on you during the season and in whom you have greater confidence moving up once the season ends. Swanson works 92-94 with a rising four-seamer, hitting 98 mph at times with some deception and life, and backs it up with a solid average slider and advanced feel for how to use both pitches in tandem. He could be something like a back-end starter who mostly uses two pitches, but he’s more likely to be the 5th-7th best starting option for a contender, and fits most comfortably as a David Phelps-type multi-inning fireman who can also do the job of long relief and spot-starting. There’s upside as a 50 FV here (4th starter or setup guy) but he’s more likely to be a 45 FV in the big leagues as a useful utility-type arm, so a 40+ or 40 FV would be appropriate.

Thompson-Williams is a sneaky athlete who’s a solid average runner with an average arm that some think can play a solid center field, but that most think is a fourth outfielder-type who can play all three spots. He has plus raw power and some feel to hit, so there’s low-end everyday upside if things continue to come together at the plate as they did in 2018. But he was 23 years old in High-A, so he’ll need to move quickly to be likely to reach that upside. More likely, Thompson-Williams is a useful bench option as a platoon at multiple spots or as a player who can provide some thump off the bench. Given his shorter track record and age, that’s a 40 FV for now with a chance to turn into a 45 FV with more performance, certainty, and proximity to the majors.

I’ve been asked a few times where these prospects fall on the dollar scale of our new prospect valuation metrics. Sheffield likely won’t rank exactly 54th on our next Top 100 in January, but the $29 million figure is about right. Swanson and Thompson-Williams combine for about $5 million more. Paxton is due in the $20-$25 million range for his next two years via arbitration while projected–using the same $9 million per WAR figure that generated the prospect values–to be worth somewhere around $60-$69 million in that span. So the Mariners receive around $35 million in prospect value, and send $35-$50 million of value back, depending on where Paxton ends up in his range. That’s within the margin for error, but is a bit lighter than expected for a Paxton package given the wide interest. That said, this trade appears to bring the Mariners out of the cellar of our first farm system rankings.

The free-agent market includes names like Patrick Corbin and Dallas Keuchel. There’s been chatter the Mets might be willing to trade Noah Syndergaard. There’s been chatter the Indians might be willing to trade Carlos Carrasco or Corey Kluber. But when the Mariners signaled their intent to take a step back this offseason, James Paxton became an obvious trade candidate, and quite possibly the best pitcher available. At least, the best pitcher available under realistic circumstances, since I don’t even know what it would take to pry Kluber away. Paxton rumors circulated for a couple of weeks, and now we’ve arrived at a conclusion, since Jerry Dipoto is hardly opposed to making moves in November. Paxton will be on his way to New York, where he’ll share a rotation with Luis Severino.

Yankees get:

• James Paxton

Mariners get:

• Justus Sheffield
• Erik Swanson
• Dom Thompson-Williams

Before too long, Paxton’s presence will be taken for granted, and attention will turn to the Yankees’ pursuit of still another starter in free agency. We’re seemingly always focused on what’s just in front of us, and what might be in front of Yankees fans soon is Corbin, or Keuchel, or somebody else. They seem likely to make another impact move to bolster the starting rotation. But for this moment, getting Paxton is a move to be celebrated. For a variety of reasons, Paxton has flown somewhat under the radar, but he’s a No. 1 starter, added to a team with a No. 1 starter.

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Lou Piniella

“Sweet Lou” Piniella spent even more years managing in the majors (23, between 1986 and 2010) than he did playing the outfield (18, between 1964 and 1984). To both, he brought a flair for the dramatic and a fiery intensity — his dust-kicking, hat-stomping, base-throwing tirades became the stuff of legend — as well as tremendous baseball acumen. Like fellow Today’s Game candidate Davey Johnson, he won championships in both phases of his career, but his failure even to reach the World Series a second time as a manager cast a long shadow on every successive stop and could limit his chances for election.

A native of Tampa, Florida who was signed by the Indians as an amateur free agent in 1962, Piniella passed through the hands of the Senators, Orioles (for whom he played four games in 1964), Indians (again, with a brief 1968 cameo) and Pilots (in their lone spring training) before winning AL Rookie of the Year honors with the Royals in 1969. A high-average contact hitter who didn’t have a ton of patience or power (as his .291/.333/.409 line suggests), he was particularly potent as a lefty-masher on four pennant-winning Yankees teams, including their 1977 and 1978 championships.

He was also notoriously hot-tempered, known for breaking water coolers even before he arrived in the Bronx. “Yes, I had a bad temper,” Piniella said in 1974, his first spring as a Yankee. “I guess I was trying to succeed too much. I probably was trying to exceed my capabilities and was expecting perfection all the time. When I couldn’t reach it, I’d get mad at myself… Last year, they had a wire mesh screen around the water cooler at the new park in Kansas City so I couldn’t kick that one.”

As a left shoulder ailment limited Piniella’s playing time late in his career, he became the Yankees’ hitting coach in 1984, while still a reserve outfielder. By mid-June, he decided to retire as a player so as to take over first base coaching duties as well. In 1986, he became the team’s manager, that during an era when owner George Steinbrenner was eating managers for breakfast and lunch. Billy Martin, in his third of five stints managing the Yankees, had gone 91-64 in relief of Yogi Berra in 1985, as the Yankees finished second, but he was fired yet again, this time after a late-September brawl with pitcher Ed Whitson. Piniella’s Yankees won 90 games but finished second in 1986, 5.5 games behind the Red Sox, then slipped to fourth despite winning 89 games in 1987. When general manager Woody Woodward resigned following the season, Piniella spent half a year as the team’s GM before returning to the dugout in May, after Martin was canned yet again. Piniella himself was axed after the 1988 team finished with 85 wins. He had two years remaining on his contract, the first of which he spent in the Yankees’ TV booth.

Piniella returned to the dugout with the Reds, taking over as manager in November 1989 after Pete Rose received his lifetime ban for gambling. His first year was the most successful one of his managerial career. Driven by stars Barry Larkin and Eric Davis as well as the “Nasty Boys” bullpen of Norm Charlton, Rob Dibble, and Randy Myers, the Reds went 91-71, won the NL West (the Senior Circuit’s screwed-up geography somehow had both Cincinnati and Atlanta in the West and St. Louis and Chicago in the East) and the World Series, the last by sweeping the heavily favored A’s, the defending champions.

The Reds collapsed to just 74 wins in 1991, and while they rebounded to 90 in 1992, Piniella resigned at season’s end, just weeks after brawling with Dibble. His departure owed more to owner Marge Schott’s lack of support when Piniella was sued for defamation by umpire Gary Darling. Following the reversal of a home run call in a 1991 game, Piniella had claimed that Darling was biased; Schott refused to pay for a lawyer, forcing Piniella to do so out of his own pocket. The suit was eventually settled out of court and Piniella issued a statement of apology, retracting his comments and praising Darling and umpires in general. “But I got no backing,” he said of Schott, who by the time of his comments had been suspended for a year due to racially insensitive remarks. “It got in my craw. That was the big thing.”

Piniella wasn’t out of a job for long. In November 1992, he reunited with Woodward in Seattle, where the Mariners had finished with a winning record just once in 17 years. With young Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, and later Alex Rodriguez, he oversaw the most successful stretch in franchise history. The Mariners finished above .500 in seven of his 10 seasons (1993-2002), making the playoffs four times (they’ve yet to return).

His 1995 team overcame a 12.5-game deficit to finish the lockout-abbreviated season tied with the Angels atop the AL West. The Mariners won the one-game tiebreaker, then beat the Yankees in a thrilling five-game Division Series that ended with Martinez bringing Griffey home with the winning run via The Double. The excitement of the moment helped generate the groundswell of support that secured the Mariners a new taxpayer-funded stadium within a week of the series’ end. Piniella won the first of his three Manager of the Year awards that year.

He took the Mariners back to the playoffs in 1997, 2000 (after Johnson and Griffey had been traded in advance of their free agency) and 2001 (after Rodriguez had departed via free agency). Fueled by the arrival of Ichiro Suzuki, the 2001 Mariners tied the major league record with 116 wins, and Piniella garnered his second Manager of the Year award. Yet his Mariners teams never advanced past the ALCS, falling at the hands of the Yankees in both 2000 and 2001. Often, they were limited by horrible bullpens, and Piniella made matters worse; the 1997-1999 units all finished with ERAs of 5.44 or above and totaled an AL-low 0.7 WAR over that span, squandering the last years of the Johnson/Griffey/Rodriguez nucleus.

After winning 93 games in 2002, Piniella, who still had one more year under contract, wanted to get home to Tampa to help care for his ailing mother. The Mariners obliged by trading him to the Devil Rays for two players. Though he guided the expansion team to its first 70-win season in 2004, the Devil Rays weren’t able to progress further, and he became frustrated by the team’s minimal payrolls. After agreeing to a buyout with one year remaining on his deal, he became the manager of the Cubs in October 2006, succeeding Dusty Baker.

With a cast led by Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano, and Carlos Zambrano (a man with an infamously hot temper of his own), Piniella guided the Cubs to back-to-back NL Central titles in 2007 and -08. He won his third Manager of the Year award in the latter year after leading the Cubs a league-high 97 wins, but in both of those seasons, Piniella’s squads were swept out of the Division Series. The Cubs declined to 83 wins in 2009, and in August 2010, with the health of his ailing mother again in mind, Piniella stepped down for the final time.

Because he managed for 21 full seasons plus two partial ones, Piniella ranks high in managerial counting stats. He’s 14th in games managed, third behind Gene Mauch and the still-active Bruce Bochy among skippers outside the Hall. Piniella is 16th in wins, trailing only Bochy, Mauch, and Baker among those not enshrined. He’s 13th in losses as well, with Mauch, Bochy and Jim Leyland the only unenshrined mangers ahead of him. Due in part to his time in Tampa Bay, he’s a modest 122 games above .500, 41st all-time; even if you wave off his time there (200-285, .412), he’d rank just 27th.

So the positives for Piniella’s case boil down to his longevity, a memorable run that legitimized major league baseball in Seattle, and one hell of a highlight reel for his tantrums. Those are offset by his lack of postseason success beyond 1990 — his teams won just three series in his final 18 full seasons — and a comparatively unexceptional winning percentage. Even if you exclude his lost-cause Devil Rays stint, his .533 would rank 30th among managers with at least 1,500 games.

Ultimately, Piniella’s case as a Hall of Fame manager rests more on longevity — which fellow candidates Johnson and Manuel lack – than it does sustained success. As I wrote when he stepped down in 2010, “In a world where [Whitey] Herzog and [Dick] Williams — two innovators who won multiple pennants, and made the playoffs more frequently without benefit of the wild card — needed a quarter of a century to gain election via the Veterans Committee, I just don’t see how Piniella has got enough to get into Cooperstown.”

George Steinbrenner

Often a bully and sometimes a buffoon, George Michael Steinbrenner III was unequivocally “The Boss,” and occasionally as unhinged as the British monarch with whom he shared both a name and a numeral. A football player at Williams College and an assistant coach at Northwestern and Purdue, he fully subscribed to Vince Lombardi’s “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” ethos, often failing to understand that running a baseball team on a daily basis required a more subtle touch and a deeper reserve of patience than his gridiron sensibility could muster.

Nonetheless, aside from Connie Mack and Walter O’Malley, no other owner in the history of baseball was as influential or successful over such a long period. Beyond O’Malley, who uprooted the Dodgers from Brooklyn, none provided his critics and detractors with more ammunition, or unified so many in their hatred. Steinbrenner spent much of his tenure as a cartoon villain, and was suspended from baseball by commissioners not once, but twice. Yet even in absentia, he had the foresight to embrace the dawn of the free agent era, and for all of his tyrannical meddling — hiring and firing 21 managers in his first 20 years, and burning through general managers at a similarly absurd clip — he stayed out of the way of what his baseball men built in his absences long enough to preside over four pennant winners and two world champions from 1976-1981, and six more pennants and four world champs from 1996-2003, adding one final championship in 2009, the year before his death.

And for all of his notorious bluster, Steinbrenner was a big softy at heart, quick to put the Yankees name behind charitable causes and to give players and other people in his organization second (and third, and fourth…) chances, just as he had received. In the end, he was the benevolent despot who restored the luster to the Yankees franchise, turning it into the most valuable property in professional sports at the time of his death, with an estimated worth of $1.6 billion. Now run by son Hal, its estimated worth has climbed to $4 billion as of March 2018 (both figures according to Forbes).

A shipbuliding magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner got his first taste of professional sports ownership with the Cleveland Pipers of the short-lived American Basketball League from 1960 to 1962; the league folded midway through its second season. He resurfaced in the world of sports when he led a group of investors that purchased the dilapidated Yankees — who hadn’t appeared in a World Series since 1964, or won since 1962 — from CBS in 1973 for about $10 million, $3.2 million less than CBS had paid in 1964. Initially, Steinbrenner pledged to keep his nose out of the team’s business, saying, “We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned.” Soon enough, however, he was crowding out his fellow investors, starting with team president Mike Burke, who had run the Yankees during the CBS era and negotiated with the City of New York to renovate Yankee Stadium. “Nothing is more limited than being a limited partner of George,” minority owner John McMullen would later say.

Steinbrenner quickly ran afoul of baseball, pleading guilty in August 1974 to charges of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and of obstructing justice. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years (later reduced to 15 months), during which time he exerted his influence via the direction of Gabe Paul, who, while still general manager of the Indians, had initially paired Steinbrenner and Burke. Desperate to restore glory to the franchise, Steinbrenner embraced the era of free agency, signing A’s ace Catfish Hunter to a five year, $3.35 million deal in December 1974, when A’s owner Charlie O. Finley failed to make an annuity payment in a timely fashion. He followed that by adding superstar slugger Reggie Jackson, Hunter’s ex-teammate, in November 1976 on a five-year, $3 million deal after arbitrator Peter Seitz’s landmark Messersmith-McNally decision kicked off the free agency era in earnest, and a year later added Goose Gossage via a six-year, $2.7 5 million deal — that despite the presence of reliever Sparky Lyle, who weeks earlier had won the AL Cy Young award.

Under manager Billy Martin, the Yankees won the pennant in 1976 but were swept in the World Series by the Big Red Machine. They beat the Dodgers the following year, with Jackson, “Mr. October,” tying the series record with five homers, three in the Game Six clincher. Amid so much turmoil that the team became known as “The Bronx Zoo” (not coincidentally the title of Lyle’s diary of that season), they repeated again in 1978, overcoming a 14-game mid-July deficit behind the Red Sox (whom they would beat in a Game 163 play-in) and a blowup between Martin and Jackson that led to the skipper’s dismissal after he said of the superstar and the owner: “The two men deserve each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Fueled by more free agent signings, particularly those of Tommy John and Dave Winfield, the Yankees won the 1981 AL pennant, but lost a rematch with the the Dodgers. During the World Series, Steinbrenner injured his hand in what he claimed was a scuffle with two Dodger fans in the hotel elevator. Yet no police report was ever filed, no culprits ever found. Hmmm… As the Dodgers clinched in the Bronx, Steinbrenner issued a gauche public apology for his team’s performance, and a promise that plans to build a champion for 1982 would begin immediately.

Those plans did not come to fruition, as Steinbrenner’s profligate spending and meddling led to the team’s downfall. Prospects were swapped for over-the-hill veterans who flourished elsewhere while the Yankees, despite winning 89 games or more four times from 1983-1987, with a high of 97 in 1985, failed to win another AL East flag for more than a decade. After souring on Winfield (whom he nicknamed “Mr. May”), Steinbrenner tried to escape his 10-year contract by hiring a shady small-time gambler, Howard Spira, to dig up dirt. When commissioner Fay Vincent learned of the plot in 1990, he banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life, just over a year after President Ronald Reagan had pardoned Steinbrenner for his Nixon-era transgressions.

The ban didn’t last; Vincent reinstated Steinbrenner as of March 1, 1993, just before being ousted by the other owners. While he remained as feared as ever, Steinbrenner stayed out of the way of what general manager Gene Michael — whom he had already hired and fired as manager and GM in the early 1980s — had done during his absence. Michael curbed the team’s tendency to swap prospects, sowing the seeds of the forthcoming dynasty by astute drafting and amateur free agent signings such as “the Core Four” of Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, and Jorge Posada, not to mention a brilliant deal that sent Roberto Kelly to Cincinnati for Paul O’Neill and freed up center field for Bernie Williams. He also hired Buck Showalter to manage the club. Showalter’s four-season tenure ran through 1995, when the Yankees reached and were ultimately eliminated from their first postseason appearance in 14 years — at the hands of Piniella’s Mariners — was the longest on Steinbrenner’s watch thus far.

Michael was shifted into an advisory role after 1995, while Showalter departed. Steinbrenner hired Bob Watson as GM, and Watson’s choice as manager was Joe Torre, a former National League MVP who in 14 seasons of managing the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals had won just one division title and produced a .470 winning percentage. The tabloids derided the choice of “Clueless Joe,” but Torre was more than up to the task of managing both the team and the Boss. The Yankees beat the Braves in the 1996 World Series, kicking off a 12-year run that included 10 division titles, six pennants, and four championships, earning him a spot in Cooperstown in 2014.

Steinbrenner’s persona as a benevolent despot emerged during this time in the form of his repeated lampooning on Seinfeld, with series creator Larry David giving voice to the owner’s long and often petty diatribes. His soft, paternalistic side revealed itself in the multiple second chances given to Steve Howe, Dwight Gooden, and Darryl Strawberry, all of whom had battled substance abuse problems. While attaching the Yankees’ name to charities, he bristled at the thought that they should include his competitors. “I would sooner send $1 million to save the whales than send it to the Pittsburgh Pirates” he told his fellow owners.

With the Yankees restored to the top of the heap, Steinbrenner withstood the temptation to sell the team (at various times, Donald Trump and Cablevision both expressed interest) or move it to the suburbs or Manhattan’s West Side. Whatever the legerdemain it took to build the $1.5 billion “House That Ruthlessness Built” next door to “The House That Ruth Built,” he ultimately understood that the Bronx was a key part of the Yankees’ brand, as was the big-dollar spending that brought in free agents Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Mark Teixeira, and CC Sabathia, and led to trades for Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and Kevin Brown. Though he chafed at the credit that Torre and GM Brian Cashman, who took the reins in 1998 at the tender age of 30 after rising through the front office ranks, received, and retained a semi-anonymous cabal of Tampa advisors who often undercut the Bronx brass, he finally ceded control of daily operations to sons Hal and Hank in late 2007. That chain of events, which was followed by Torre’s departure when the team was eliminated from the playoffs, led to Steinbrenner receding from the public eye.

Ultimately, the indomitable owner’s legacy is a mixed and complicated one. Neither a saint nor a pure font of evil, he understood that nothing drove financial success the way winning did. He won more often than any owner of his era, and rebuilt the Yankees into the most valuable property in baseball. For all of his transgressions, you can’t even begin to tell the story of a substantial stretch of baseball history without him. Unlike the eight other candidates I’ve reviewed on the Today’s Game ballot thus far, he’d have my vote. But as he came nowhere close to election with either the 2010 Veterans Committee or the 2017 Today’s Game ballots, he’s hardly a lock this time around.

The Seattle Mariners’ offseason hasn’t gotten off to an ideal start. Despite a 2018 campaign that saw the team win 89 games and compete for a Wild Card spot most of the year, the club appears likely to blow up its roster, having begun the process already with a trade of starting catcher Mike Zunino to Tampa Bay. That was followed by word that Seattle planned to move ace James Paxton, who still has two years of team control left.

While bad news for the team’s short-term prospects, such deals are at least designed to maximize the long-term health of the organization. Another recent development, however, would seem to have little in the way of silver linings. As Ryan Divish reported on Monday, the team suddenly finds itself in the throes of a messy public parting of the ways with ex-employee Dr. Lorena Martin.

You may recall that Dr. Martin was hired a little over a year ago as the team’s first “director of high performance,” a position crafted to use analytics and medicine to keep players healthy. At the time, Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto issued a glowing review of his new hire, as passed along by the Seattle Times.

Martin, who was the director of sports performance analytics for the Los Angeles Lakers, will oversee the organization’s medical, strength and conditioning, nutrition and mental-skills departments.

“We have spent nearly a year working on creating this position and structure as well as identifying the best person for this role,” Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto said. “Lorena’s background, skill set and previous experience make her a perfect match for what we envisioned.”

Despite the somewhat florid title, Dr. Martin’s role with the Mariners was fairly groundbreaking.

With the Mariners, she was put in charge of all aspects of physical and mental training for the team’s players, incorporating data from various trainers, coaches and physicians to improve performance.

“My passion for statistics derived from my desire to just want to answer a simple question: ‘What are the variables that professional athletes must have in order to become a world class athlete in their sport?’” Martin told GeekWire. “I found that I could answer my questions through research, measurement, statistics, and analytics.”

In June 2018, the Mariners were still lauding Martin and the job she was doing. In July, TJ Cotterill wrote a profile of Martin for the News-Tribune, noting that Martin had reduced the Mariners’ injuries by 50%. She received praise from Felix Hernandez, who told Cotterill that “[s]he’s made a huge impact.”

But the honeymoon didn’t last. Though Martin was signed to a three-year contract, the Mariners terminated her employment in early October. Ryan Divish relays for the Seattle Times that the Mariners didn’t believe she was as successful at changing the organization’s culture as the club originally anticipated she would be.

Martin’s presence with the major-league team wasn’t as visible as first expected. Dipoto gave her oversight over all aspects of the training and conditioning programs for the entire organization. It was was a massive undertaking.

Also, some players were slow to embrace a new style of thinking about their health, conditioning, nutrition and recovery… there were rumblings that she would have her role reduced with the big-league team and that she would instead work out of the team’s complex in Arizona, focusing more on the minor-league staff in 2019.

But on Monday, Martin posted on Instagram a different explanation for her termination.

In other words, Dr. Martin is not only alleging senior leadership used racist language but is heavily implying that she and others were terminated for reporting such language. If true, that would violate both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as Washington’s state-level Human Rights Act. And while we don’t have enough facts to know whether Martin would have standing to file suit for a racist remark if it wasn’t directed at her, terminating her for reporting that conduct is almost certainly unlawful.

The Mariners issued a categorical denial that any such racist conduct occurred.

Martin responded to the Mariners’ statement by confirming that she had, in fact, reported racist incidents to Mariners management.

Of note in Martin’s tweet here is that she provides actual names of trainers she says the Mariners terminated for reporting discriminatory statements. The Mariners, for their part, didn’t deny firing any trainers for that purpose — they denied firing any trainers at all.

So who’s right? We know that Martin didn’t pull the names out of a hat. The team’s categorical denials leave them very little wiggle room should new details emerge. Santiago, for example, was confirmed as working for the Mariners as an athletic coordinator before the 2017 season. I wasn’t able to find any public confirmation that either Santiago or Valdez were terminated, but it should also be noted that neither is listed on the team’s staff directory or coaching roster (though Dr. Martin is still listed). Martin explained her delay in coming forward as the result of ongoing negotiations.

Ryan Divish confirmed at least that such negotiations were occurring, writing that “[s]ources indicated that the Mariners are trying to avoid paying the remaining two years on Martin’s three-year contract for various reasons and that she has hired an attorney.” At the same time, Divish noted that Martin’s contract likely contained an arbitration clause, which would preclude either side from bringing a lawsuit and require both parties to present their claims to an arbitrator.

So why did the Mariners terminate Martin? At this point, we have the team saying it was poor performance and Martin saying it was retaliation for reporting racist comments. It’s also worth noting that the team, including Dipoto, has previously taken a hard line against racist comments, most notably suspending catcher Steve Clevenger without pay for tweets he made regarding Black Lives Matter. The details of this incident are still emerging. Dr. Martin went on the record with the Tacoma News Tribune Monday evening to further detail her allegations; the Mariners once again issued a categorical denial, calling Dr. Martin’s claims “fabricated,” including “her statements about reports to Human Resources and specific allegations about people named in the story.” We simply don’t have enough information at this point to conclusively determine what happened, but either way, this will be a cloud hanging over the Mariners’ already challenging offseason until we have greater clarity.