Mariners Moose Tracks, 11/1/20: Julio Rodríguez, The Mets!, Tomoyuki Sugano

Hello and welcome to November 1, aka the earliest day I have ever finished the bulk of my holiday shopping. Being stuck indoors with an excuse to shop online has been bad news for my wallet but very good news for everyone on my gift list. Now given the way time works in 2020, it will either feel like six hundred years or six seconds before Christmas actually rolls around, but it’s nice to be prepared either way. Also preparing you for the holiday season: the gift of these links.

In Mariners news:

• A wild Patrick Frick appears!

• Otherwise, the Mariners bats were fairly quiet in yesterday’s game, although Cal Raleigh continued to torment the poor little pitchers who have to face him and his Wonderbat:

• Julio didn’t play in yesterday’s game, but here he is making some noise anyway:

ICYMI, Julio will be playing for the Leones de Escogido in LIDOM play starting on November 15. He’ll join an Escogido team that also boasts top prospect Wander Franco, and fellow Mariner Luis Liberato (as well as former Mariner Joseph Rosa). If you’re interested in watching those games, good news! There’s a deal very similar to MLB TV for LIDOM baseball, and right now there’s an early-bird special: just 15 bucks gets you all-access for the season. Sign up here. (Pro tip: the website doesn’t translate well with the Google translate feature, so if your Spanish knowledge is zero, you might want to try another browser, or ask a friend for help. It’s pretty intuitive though, even if you don’t know what the prompts are saying. Contraseña means “password”, that’s about as tricky as it gets, and you can use PayPal to pay, which cuts out a few steps.)

• Ryan Divish named a few free-agent relievers he thinks the Mariners should target.
• Poor Sam Carlson.

Around the League:

• Even with a new owner, it takes a while to wash the Mets off the Mets.

• Speaking of the Mets, they apparently intend to extend Marcus Stroman a qualifying offer for $18.9M, ideally picking up an extra draft pick when he declines. Per Anthony DiComo, the industry expectation is that Stroman will in fact decline and seek a multiyear deal, but if I was Stro, watching quality players get sent to free agency left and right, I would take that bag, thank you very much, and test my luck on the market next season.
• In other Mets news, Dellin Betances will be exercising his $6M player option, because he is not a dunderhead.
• Dustin Pedroia, aka the only likeable Red Sox player for a great many years, appears to be ready to announce his retirement soon.
• The Astros’ pay cuts include Baseball Prospectus alum Kevin Goldstein, per the Athletic ($).
• Yankees pitcher Tommy Kahnle, who will miss the 2021 season recovering from TJ surgery, has elected free agency.
• Speaking of relievers electing free agency, Rays RHP Chaz Roe has elected free agency. Roe posted good numbers in the shortened season but the 34-year old went down in late August with an elbow injury and missed the Rays playoff run.
• A rare exception to the free agency boom, if not an unexpected one: the Cubs have picked up Anthony Rizzo’s $16.5M option.
• Nick Castellanos will be back with the Reds in 2021.
• The Diamondbacks have released Kevin Cron to go play in Japan.
• Rob Manfred is open to future neutral-site World Series. Because of course he is.
• Tomoyuki Sugano, Japan’s top pitcher, might be headed to MLB. He might want to wait it out and see how teams treat players in free agency first, in my opinion.

Kate’s pick:

Halloween is my favorite holiday, so yesterday kind of sucked, honestly. Every Halloween, though, I am grateful for this tweet, which I sometimes think about out of nowhere and just start laughing about to myself: