The Mariners are next in our arbitration eligibles series.
- First time: Shawn Kelley
- Second time: Jason Vargas
- Third time: David Aardsma, Luis Rodriguez
- Fourth time: Brandon League
Aardsma and Rodriguez are the primary non-tender candidates. Aardsma's salary in arbitration would remain close to $4.5MM and can't go below $3.6MM. Since he had Tommy John surgery in July, that wouldn't be good value. Rodriguez is a $700K type player, but he hasn't done anything noteworthy this year. Kelley also projects for $700K. Fully recovered from Tommy John, I think the Mariners will keep him around for 2012.
Vargas and League should each land in the $4.2-4.5MM range for 2012. They're both trade candidates, especially League having saved 34 games and counting.
If Kelley, Vargas, and League are retained, that should add around $9.4MM to the team's commitments, bringing the total to about $69MM before accounting for minimum salary players. That'd be about $26MM short of the 2011 payroll, so the team has flexibility.
What about Brendan Ryan?
He’s under contract.
So league will be non tendered then go to the twins 😀
The Twins love to trade for relievers, so it’s more likely that the Mariners would trade League to the Twins. For Denard Span.
Poor Aardsma. He finally gets it all together (control wise) and then he blew his arm out, has to have major surgery, miss at least a full season and lose his chance to cash in on that big pay day.
now when he does return it’s more than likely going to have to be on a “make good” offer somewhere. I always liked that guy, huge talent, even with the Chisox and Boston that just seemed to never be able to put it together until he got regular time on the mound with Seattle.
Hope he returns/stays with them and they work with him. They seemed like a good match.
Lots of people in Seattle have talked about this, and I agree with their assessment that Aardsma will be non-tendered and then will sign a lesser contract with incentives to return to Seattle a la Erik Bedard.
This would be ideal.
Its also interesting that LookoutLanding did this a couple weeks ago and came out around $10m higher than your $69m already committed and insinuated very limited flexibility, which is very opposite to the $26m you throw out saying the team does have flexibility.
Either way, I think that ownership is going to have to open up a payroll more reminiscent of 2008 than 2011 to get done what needs to get done this off-season.