Thanks for Ruining It for Everyone, Seattle Mariners

Remember before the season when everyone called the Mariners dark horses to steal the division from the Angels this season?  Well, at 35-53 they somehow managed to do it… they just did it for the wrong team when they peddled Cliff Lee to the Texas Rangers.  Thanks, Seattle Mariners.  Thanks for ruining it for everyone.

How could the Mariners let this happen?

The only reason the Mariners would do something like this is because they are petty.  That is really the only explanation I can think of (well, that and they got a super stud prospect in Justin Smoak, but let’s not drag down this rant with all your little “facts” and “logic”).

Mired in a dreadful season where their off-season spending spree has earned them a pitiful 35-53 record, the Mariners have to be pretty upset that all the promise they had coming into the season has been spoiled so quickly and their taking out their frustration on the Halos.  Seattle really thought this was going to be their year, the mighty Angels were finally going down and if it can’t be them to do the toppling, they are at least going to lend someone else a hand, and in this case that hand takes the form of a Cy Young caliber pitcher and the cash necessitated to be able to afford him.

And it is that cash that makes this trade such a royal “F you” to the Angels.  The Rangers are essentially broke.  They never should have been able to add a high-paid player like Cliff Lee to the fold since they are stuck in bankruptcy court, haggling with their many creditors who all want to be paid.  They don’t even really have an owner right now since Tom Hicks had to hand the team over to Major League Baseball because of the financial mess he made.  Nolan Ryan is trying to buy the team, but the bankruptcy court isn’t letting it happen.  With that kind of a quagmire muddling things up, the Rangers had no feasible way of making this trade happen unless the Mariners inexplicably decided to bail them out by picking up a big chunk of Lee’s remaining salary.  They’d never do that, right?

Dammit.

Now, because the Mariners enjoy flushing money down the toilet so much, the Rangers are firmly entrenched in the driver’s seat in the AL West.  Lee addresses their biggest weakness, starting pitching, in a big, big way (though having him lose his first start as a Ranger certainly warms my heart).  The Ranger back end of their rotation has mostly been in shambles this year and putting a huge workload on the shoulders of their strong bullpen which Angel fans had been hoping would soon breakdown.  That might still happen, after all, Lee can only pitch once every five days, but he is a horse and at the very least will give the Texas relievers a welcome break.

As pissed as I am about this, I am not going to join all the masses and say that Angels should just raise the white flag now that the Rangers have Cliff Lee.  The Halos aren’t playing very well right now (he said, in the understatement of the month), but neither are the Rangers who just got swept at home by the lowly Baltimore Orioles, which is hopefully an early start to their traditional second half swoon.  I’m not saying that it is going to be easy for the Angels to overtake Texas, but with a 4.5 game margin and 14 games remaining against their Texas rivals (including six before the trade deadline) it certainly isn’t like the Angels don’t have ample opportunity to reel the Rangers back.  It just would have been a lot easier to do if Cliff Lee weren’t sporting Ranger blue which he never would have been if the Mariners didn’t cough up the green to make it happen.

But maybe I shouldn’t complain.  After all, at least the Yankees didn’t get Lee.  It’s one thing to give the Rangers a boost in winning the AL West, it is an entirely different thing to just hand the Yankees another World Series.