Mariners Moose Tracks, 8/2/20: Brandon Brennan, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Trout behbeh, brunch

I am going to (further) reveal myself as extremely White Lady Of A Certain Age, but damned if I don’t enjoy a good brunch. I love breakfast foods of all stripes—my ideal is blending sweet and savory, so I love to have like, gorgeous fluffy butter-golden pancakes alongside a breakfast meat and some eggs being bodyguarded by a hot sauce/ketchup (I KNOW, OK)/black pepper mélange. A well done biscuits and gravy combo causes me to float into an establishment like a cartoon character with designs on a pie cooling on a windowsill. But the best part of brunch, the thing that puts it over the top for any other meal for me, is that as a person who loves liquids, I cherish that at brunch you could conceivably have three or even four different active drinks in front of you: water, coffee, mimosa/Bloody Mary/whatever that beer brunch drink is with hefeweizen. To me, this is the dream, and something I would never do at home because I love brunch almost as much as I hate washing dishes. ANYWAY all this is to say, I really miss brunch, a meal I love but will almost certainly never make for myself. All those dishes, you see. Anyway, as my Eggo sadly rotates in the microwave, on to today’s links:

In Mariners news:

• The Mariners lost their three-game winning streak yesterday, losing to Oakland 3-2 in their first experience with the new extra-innings rule. Catch up with the recap here.
• The team announced yesterday that Brandon Brennan has been moved to the 45-day IL with a left oblique injury, effectively ending his season. Get well soon, BB, and please don’t do whatever it was Mitch Haniger did to rehab his oblique injury.
• More from Ryan Divish on the Mariners’ cuts in the baseball ops and scouting departments. We’ll have more analysis on this later, but wow, these are some pretty significant cuts for a club that isn’t exactly low-revenue—even given minor-league contraction. It’s particularly disheartening to see Amanda Hopkins, one of MLB’s lone female scouts—and someone the Mariners were perfectly happy to trot out at various Women In Baseball panels over the years—is being let go.

Around the League:

• In case anyone still believes COVID-19 is “just like the flu,” here’s a story of another athlete in the prime of his life whose body has been altered by the novel coronavirus to the point where he can’t participate at all in the 2020 season: 27-year-old Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez is opting out of the season due to a heart problem caused by his COVID-19 infection.
• “I am not a quitter” is definitely not a sentence that will come back and haunt Manfred, sure.

• Brewers player Lorenzo Cain has decided to opt out of the 2020 season.
• Mike Trout will return to games after his wife gave birth to their first child, named Beckham Aaron (Aaron is presumably a nod to Trout’s brother-in-law, Aaron Cox, a former minor-league pitcher who committed suicide in 2018). The baby has already recorded 3 WAR against the Mariners.
• The Marlins continue to bolster their depleted squad, this time adding RHP James Hoyt from Cleveland in exchange for a PTBNL. Basically all of this comes down to a player-for-player swap...so who should the Mariners, who left a bunch of their MLB-adjacent prospects (Penn Murfee, Jack Anderson, Eric Filia) off the 60-man, send to Miami?
• A real downer indeed!

• Maintaining the theme of Bad News For The Astros, top prospect Forrest Whitley is experiencing some arm tightness.

Kate’s Pick:

Ugh, today’s links are kind of a bummer, I’m sorry. That’s just how it goes sometimes. So I’m going to go for the nuclear option to put a smile on your face this Sunday. Now go out and be great!