Seattle Mariners Now Linked To Wil Myers Kind Of

I know a lot of Mariners fans have wanted the team to try to put together a trade offer for Royals prospect Wil Myers. I know the Mariners probably have interest in Wil Myers, behind closed doors. The Mariners and many of their fans are fond of the idea of having Wil Myers. This is not unlike people who describe themselves as "fun-loving". Who doesn't like to have fun? Having fun is enjoyable by definition. Everybody in the world is fun-loving, and everybody in the baseball world is Wil Myers-loving. It's obvious and now here's a link to a thing.

In their search for a top-of-the-rotation starter, the Royals have dangled outfielder Wil Myers, the consensus 2012 minor league player of the year, two sources told Yahoo! Sports.
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In addition to the Rays, sources said the Royals have discussed deals with Arizona, Seattle and Oakland, all teams with a plethora of young starters in or near the major leagues.

We don't know for a fact that the Royals have discussed deals with the Mariners. If they have, we don't know for a fact that they've discussed deals involving Wil Myers, instead of, say, Billy Butler, to whom the Mariners have also been linked, on multiple occasions. But let's take these sources at their word, because of course come offseason time everybody is to be trusted, even -- or especially! -- the anonymous. Wow, Wil Myers! He's practically right there for the taking!

Myers turns 22 in a couple weeks. He's a right-handed outfielder who was drafted nine picks after Kyle Seager. Two years ago, he hit eight home runs. Last year, he hit 37 home runs, posting a .987 OPS between double-A and triple-A. He is an elite position-player prospect, and though one might wonder why the Royals would make him available, they're the Royals, so one shouldn't wonder about that for too long, lest one end up wondering about everything. One kind of gets dragged into a rabbit hole of determinism.

Myers would be perfect for a team like the Mariners, because he could help now and way in the future, and he's cheap and under team control. The Mariners are also in the market for a corner outfielder. But the other thing about Myers is that he would be perfect for almost every team. He has more trade value than all but a select group of players, and players with extremely high trade value have extremely high trade value because they're extremely and widely desirable.

The Royals have added a couple starters already this offseason, and now reports say they want to add a good one. It's suggested that Myers would only be moved in exchange for a top-of-the-rotation arm. The Mariners have one of those, and they're not moving him to Kansas City. What the Mariners also have are Erasmo Ramirez and prospects, but it definitely seems like the Royals could do better than Erasmo or prospects, with Myers as bait.

We know that the Royals have heavily scouted James Paxton, but he didn't have an outstanding season. None of the Mariners' big pitching prospects have done anything good in triple-A, and it seems like the Royals most want someone more proven. The Rays seem like a better fit, for reasons Dave has already written about. The Rays have too many starters and they've already reportedly been dangling Jeremy Hellickson, and I don't know how the Mariners could compete with that unless they tried to put together a big package. This might even be the nature of the conversations the Mariners and Royals have had -- it's possible the Mariners asked about Myers, and the Royals told them there isn't a great fit. Seems to me there isn't.

But what I think you have to hope for, if you're big on the Mariners getting Myers, is that the Royals hold the Mariners' pitchers in particularly high regard. The Royals might have a better opinion of Paxton than most, or something, and that would work in the Mariners' favor. I'm not of the opinion that Paxton is ready for the bigs, and maybe the Mariners aren't either, but maybe the Royals are. Maybe the Royals aren't so big on what the Rays could give them. I have no insight here, except that different teams evaluate different players differently. What might make sense to us might not make sense to Dayton Moore; in that event, Dayton Moore might very well be right.

The Mariners landing Myers would be insane, if only because that would give the Mariners Myers, Jesus Montero, Dustin Ackley, and Justin Smoak, and these are four of recent seasons' very top position-player prospects. The Mariners seem unlikely to land Myers, if Myers even gets moved, so we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. It's just a thing that isn't impossible. It's not like opening a jar of peanut butter with your mind. That's impossible. Maybe I'm just not doing it right.