A Marriage made in Coffee Town or Sleepless in Seattle

[CubinNY]

As soon as the WS is over, I think Jed should be on the bat phone to Jerry Dipoto trying to pry Logan Gilbert or one of the other young starters away from Seattle. In the minors the Cubs have redundancies all over the infield and the MLB team is locked in in the corner spot for a few years. 

[Bertz]

I actually really like this as an avenue for improvement that hasn't been talked up a ton yet.  The Mariners have been floating since the deadline that they'd do a young SP/young Hitter swap.  

There's really two tiers of pitcher at play here.  Gilbert and Kirby are immensely valuable,  BBTV says something like PCA, Chris Morel, and Ben Brown for Gilbert is fair, and add another player of consequence (e.g. Owen Caissie) to bump up to Kirby.  That is A LOT to give up, but then again they're young aces making the league minimum.    

Seattle has a second tier of starter available too.  Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo are, again according to BBTV, worth roughly Morel + some filler.  

Either way, if you knock SP off the to-do list with a guy making the league minimum it really opens up financial options to do more or less anything you want in FA.  I'm pretty clearly all in on Soto but this is a fun alternative.  Ohtani + a Mariners starter is probably the single most impactful 1-2 punch of moves Jed could make this winter.

[Tim]

9 hours ago, Bertz said:

There's really two tiers of pitcher at play here.  Gilbert and Kirby are immensely valuable,  BBTV says something like PCA, Chris Morel, and Ben Brown for Gilbert is fair, and add another player of consequence (e.g. Owen Caissie) to bump up to Kirby.  That is A LOT to give up, but then again they're young aces making the league minimum.    

Seattle has a second tier of starter available too.  Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo are, again according to BBTV, worth roughly Morel + some filler.  

If those are the prices, then give me Bryce Miller. The difference between him and Gilbert isn't worth PCA & Brown, imo. Miller throws a full tick slower, but he's a year younger, has two extra years of control and has otherwise similar FIP metrics. The other concern is the fly ball rate, but Gilbert's not exactly a ground ball machine, either.

I think I'd rather just pay Yamamoto, but I can understand preferring to go in this direction for established MLB performance + salary difference. For me, that preference may just come down to whether or not Stroman opts in or not.