Withering Felix Trade Scenarios?

Felix Hernandez has been on my mind since Franklin Gutierrez got his contract extension and we have yet to hear anything exciting about the Mariners and Felix getting close on numbers. I thought about what kind of contract extension Felix is likely to want, and what I would like to sign him for were I approaching this impartially. A full breakdown of that will follow by the way. In the process of processing those thoughts, I remarked how the frame of discussion had changed so much from the beginning of the winter.

Remember how fearful many of us were at the start of the offseason that we had just watched Felix pitch his last game in a Mariner uniform? There were good reasons to be afraid of that. We had heard about the various types of packages allegedly being offered in the past July trading deadline. We knew Boston was drooling over him and the Mariners entered the offseason in a clear position behind the division favorites. We figured they were going to explore contract negotiations with Felix early on and the fruits of those talks would drive the rest of the offseason. Dave Cameron even outlined this using many words.

Talks about trading Felix have fallen dramatically off and I started pondering why. Obviously, that the Mariners have yet to do so and there's been nothing in the way of trade rumors helps, but a big factor has been that Jack Zduriencik and his team have managed to do exactly what Dave stated they needed to do:

Cliff Lee, Chone Figgins and Milton Bradley later and Jack did exactly that, adding a lot of wins at a below market rate. So instead of being mired around .500 and clearly behind Anaheim and Texas in the division, the Mariners find themselves with solid footing heading into the season. As a result, the logical basis for trading Felix this winter has disappeared.

I wonder if I could remove the "this winter" qualifier from that preceding sentence though. Has the front office , to a degree, ruled out trading Felix? Now that I have written that, let me step back and issue several important warnings. I am operating here with no inside knowledge. I am talking about subjective probabilities only. I cannot claim to know the thought processes of the people involved in these decisions and discussions. I am merely philosophizing on the matter. A lot of the thoughts are based on assumptions and projections.

Essentially, there are two periods of time when big trades generally happen: the winter and the trade deadline. There are two years left before Felix hits free agency and counting this winter as still active, the front office has four such prime trading periods. Taking each of them in turn, I tried to work through probable scenarios in each time period. I will miss some.

THIS OFFSEASON

Given the moves Jack has already made, I don't think it makes sense to trade Felix at this point. Massive trades, which this would require, don't tend to happen this late in the offseason. By mid to late January, teams are usually finishing up their active roster, fishing through the waters of veteran castoffs and lingering free agents to patch the last couple roster spots. If Seattle wanted to trade Felix and still compete in 2010, it would need a haul of Major League talent coming back and we just don't have a ton of roster spots open that would allow that. Furthermore, it would require the other team, or teams, involved to scramble to fill newly opened holes on their active roster with inferior free agent talent to choose from.

If Seattle wanted to rebuild and thus be open to trading Felix for a bevy of prospects, then trading for Cliff Lee was sure a weird way of signaling that desire to other GMs. No, I think it's safe to say the Mariners are playing to win this season and at this juncture of the winter, the team doesn't win by trading Felix Hernandez.

THIS JULY

If the team is scuffling come July, then trading Felix might be re-visited and both Felix and Lee could hit the block, but how likely is it that the team is out of the playoff picture by then? The end of July is roughly around game 100 of the season. Given the relative strengths of each team in the division, charted before, the odds that the Mariners are clearly out of it after just 100 games are not high.

That leaves a blockbuster trade in which Felix gets traded for a package that maintains or improves Seattle's postseason odds. Those types of trade can happen, but they are rare, especially midseason. There are just too many conditions that would have to be met - a trading partner in the right situation with the right sort of players available - to make that anything close to a probable situation for the Mariners to find themselves in. So while possible, it's certainly not probable that it will make sense to trade Felix at the deadline either.

NEXT OFFSEASON

That leaves the winter after the 2010 season, with just one club control year left, essentially the same situation that Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay were in this winter. You saw the return those got and the return that Johan Santana got a couple years ago. Those were not earth-shattering trade packages.

In an isolated sense, it might make sense, but if Felix is still on the team at that point, that likely means the team was contending through at least July. And if they were good through July, then likely it's a team that contended late into the season. If the team competes strongly, it's almost certainly going to be on the backs of their run prevention. Hernandez and Lee are going to look like kings in front of this defense. Coming off the turnaround in 2009 and excitement from another contending season, fronted by two pitching studs, it might be difficult for fans to have the team lose Cliff Lee to free agency and then see Felix Hernandez traded.

NEXT JULY

Trading Felix at the deadline of 2011, with just a few months left of club control could still be viable. CC Sabathia got Cleveland a non-trivial return when he was dealt in the same contract status, but realistically, you're not looking at getting much back and a large percentage of people would view that as the final nail in the coffin of a possible extension.

Now, two years is a long time. Two years ago, the Mariners had just signed Carlos Silva and traded for Erik Bedard. Tons of stuff changes. I'm just musing around here, trying to follow the most probable paths and seeing where they end up given the constrains involved. I just am having a hard time coming up with a reasonably likely scenario in which the Mariner front office evaluates things and decides it makes sense to explore trading Felix.

I think the Mariners might have, in effect, boxed themselves into a corner by not trading him already and improving the team instead. Remember how Dave talked about rumors needing to pass the smell test and that's why he was never worried about Jason Bay and did think Chone Figgins made sense? Well, trading Felix needs to pass that same test.  A situation would need to arise that makes the front office consider a trade to be a worthwhile avenue. Such a situation was possible at the start of this winter. However, I'm not so sure that Jack Zduriencik's performance since has not severely reduced the probability of any similar circumstance reappearing in the next two years.