Mariners Moose Tracks 12/4: $crabble, Paimon the Demon King, and Hyphen

Happy first Sunday of December! If you haven’t yet, please check out our Advent Calendar series, celebrating the most glorious moments of the 2016 season.

In Mariners news:

• If you missed it yesterday: details emerged on the Rzepczynski signing; the Mariners also signed RHP Casey Fien to a minor league deal with a bonus if he makes the major league club. To make space, Zach Lee and Dean Kiekhefer were DFA’d. In other news, I have learned to spell Rzepczynski faster than I have learned to spell Povse. (I keep trying to make it a Z instead of a V; I think I’m conflating it with Pazos? And if I get there, I keep wanting to call him Matt. His name just falls out of my brain immediately. He’s my Ann Veal.)
• Winter meetings start this week, and I pity the fool who stands between Jerry and his intended target. Soon we will have a new pitcher to call our very own.
• If you want to take a deeper dive, there’s a new episode of the always-informative Hot Stove podcast with Shannon Drayer and James Osborn. Shannon reveals some really interesting information about Pax, and there’s also a great Mel Stottlemyre Jr. interview in which he gives his perspective on Félix’s off-season plan and how that will change this year. They also spend some time talking about my favorite thing: the bullpen.

Around the league:

• The Astros added Carlos Beltrán. Paimon the demon king, take the Astros.
• I hope you didn’t order your Mariners Rich Hill jersey yet, because it looks like he’s going to re-sign with the Dodgers. The deal promises to be fairly hefty, which might impact the Dodgers’ ability to pick up other high-price free agents like Aroldis Chahahaha who are we kidding the Dodgers will just break open another Brinks truck and get whoever they want.
• It looks like Mark Melancon, whose name I definitely didn’t just type as Melancolon and laugh and laugh, is going to get himself a nice payday, probably with the Giants.
• The Cubs might be strong contenders in the Tyson Ross market, which would be good in that it would keep him out of our league and also prevent the Astros from somehow signing him, but bad because this destroys my dream of having him play for us. West coast best coast, Ty!

With the non-tender deadline passing, former Mariner Ryan Rowland-Smith shared his personal non-tender story. Which is an ironic name, because the story itself is very tender. So many pieces are getting scattered around at this time of year and there’s so much activity and as fans, we can sometimes forget that all of these moves have faces behind them. We appreciate you sharing this with us, Hyphen.

Sunday song:

This cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (of the Bangles, doy) is a sweet alt-rock take on the classic: