Are 2001 Mariners a cautionary trade deadline tale for 2024 Phillies? originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The 2001 Seattle Mariners were a wrecking ball, a team that really did seem to have it all. Scored the most runs. Allowed the fewest runs. Eight All-Stars, four of them starters. Won an astonishing 116 games, more than half of them by at least four runs.
Ichiro, then a rookie, was voted Most Valuable Player. Second baseman Bret Boone finished third and three other Mariners (future Hall of Fame DH Edgar Martinez, closer Kazuhiro Sasaki and center fielder Mike Cameron) received votes.
Which didn’t keep manager Lou Piniella from agitating, privately and publicly, for more. Specifically, Sweet Lou thought he needed another left-handed bat to gird his team going into the postseason.
And never mind that three of the regulars (right fielder Ichiro, first baseman John Olerud and left fielder Al Martin) batted from the left side, that shortstop Carlos Guillen and utility man Mark McLemore were both switch-hitters and that backups Stan Javier and Tom Lampkin were also left-handed hitters.
Twenty-three years later, echoes of that long-ago season ring faintly through the executive suites at Citizens Bank Park.
The Phillies currently have the best record in baseball. They, too, had eight players selected to the All-Star team and are regarded as the new favorite to win the whole shebang this autumn.
Still, there’s concern, among the fan base at least, that another right-handed outfield bat is necessary if the organization hopes to capture the third World Series trophy in franchise history. And that’s where the past and present come together in one of those neat connections that makes baseball so much fun.
Phillies senior advisor Pat Gillick, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2011, was their general manager when they last won it all in 2008. He was also the Seattle GM who fielded Piniella’s entreaties all those years ago.
“Like a lot of managers, Lou was always wanting to add to his lineup,” he recalled last weekend while in Cooperstown for the annual induction ceremonies. “He wanted to be in a position late in the game to be able to go to the bench and get a right or left-hand hitter off the bench. Or start four left-handers in a game against a right-handed starter. Or even more than that. He wanted as much versatility as possible.”
One of the reasons Gillick has a plaque among the game’s immortals is because he was eternally vigilant about improving his club in the margins. So it’s not that he didn’t look to get the puzzle piece his manager wanted. It’s that it didn’t exist. At least not at a price he thought was prudent.
Gillick isn’t the only common bond between the two clubs, either.
After they beat the Rangers on May 22, the Phillies’ record stood at 36-14. The last team to get to 50 wins that quickly was, you guessed it, those Mariners. But manager Rob Thomson wasn’t waving any pom poms when a reporter reminded him of that fact afterward.
“What did they do?”
“They won 116 games.”
“But what did they do at the end?”
“They did not win the championship.”
“That’s right. So you’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep pushing all the way through.”
Yeah. About that …
The trade deadline passed unobserved at Safeco Field that year. The Mariners eliminated the Indians in the ALDS but batted .211 as a team against the Yankees in the ALCS while losing four out of five.
It would be disingenuous to argue that acquiring a bat off the bench, no matter how productive it might have been, would have changed the outcome in that series. But the fact remains that Seattle remains the only Major League Baseball franchise to have never appeared in the World Series.
Counterintuitive as it seems, one of the reasons for the lack of activity might have been that the team was simply too good. A club pushing to make the playoffs could be more inclined to take a risk to try to earn a spot in the tournament. A team that’s clearly already among the elite — like the Mariners then, like the Phillies now — may not feel the same sense of urgency to borrow against its future.
Think of it like this: If you’re cruising down the freeway with plenty of gas and time to spare to reach your destination, you’re much less likely to stop and top off the tank than if you’re running late and the fuel light has been on for the last 20 miles.
“It’s a balancing act,” Gillick explained. “You’ve got to play now because you’ve got an opportunity to go to the playoffs and, hopefully, the World Series. But you have to put that against what player you have to give up and where he fits into your program down the line. You’ve got to have a short-term plan and a long-term plan.”
Let the record reflect that, if Thomson has presented a wish list to baseball operations president Dave Dombrowski and general manager Sam Fuld, they have all kept that information to themselves.
Besides, maybe Weston Wilson will show enough before 6 p.m. next Tuesday to convince management that he’s as good as any right-handed bat they could acquire. Maybe Johan Rojas or Cristian Pache will go on a tear. Maybe Brandon Marsh will suddenly get the hang of hitting lefties.
Or maybe, as happened with the Mariners, the right fit just doesn’t exist. In any of those scenarios, the Phillies could stick with the status quo in the outfield and apply those resources to getting, say, another bullpen arm.
Are the 2001 Mariners a cautionary tale for the 2024 Phillies? What makes the trade deadline so intriguing — and frustrating — is that nobody will know until October.
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