NEWSLETTER
The lockout continues, and will for the foreseeable future, but that isn’t going to stop teams from planning the rest of their offseason. And maybe even making moves to signal elements of their offseason?
It’s already been reported widely that the Seattle Mariners are into free agent Kris Bryant, which is why things like this raise an eyebrow. I tend to think these kinds of dot-connections are almost always overstated, but if a plugged-in Mariners blog is doing the wink-wink thing, I think it’s at least worth sharing for fun:
I am excited/proud to share that I have been hired to be part of the player development staff for the Seattle @Mariners org. The process/people are tremendous. Thank U 2 all I have connected w/during the hiring process and a special thanks to @AndyMcKayHG and @CoachGilly6
👊🏽#DTZ pic.twitter.com/eib5FBeFlq— Coach Marcelino (@CoachMarcelino) December 12, 2021
Re: last RT: Brad Marcelino, the Mariners’ recently-hired hitting coach, was Kris Bryant’s college coach at USD 👀👀👀
— Lookout Landing (@LookoutLanding) December 12, 2021
There’s a little tongue-in-cheek going on here – I don’t think the Mariners exclusively hired a new coach in their player development department as a way to recruit Kris Bryant on a monster big league contract in a couple months. But I do think that, now that it’s happened, they could probably try to backchannel an emoji or two to Bryant’s camp. Maybe Bryant still gets together with the ole ball coach around Christmastime and now his Christmas card will read something like:
Dear Kris –
I am so happy I just got a job with THE MARINERS, and I WANT to say how happy I was to see YOU for Christmas. Appreciate that you were WILLING to meet up over by us, and then TO GO to the movies, even though it was after your normal NINE o’clock bedtime. lol. I know, it FIGURES that I would mention that old joke. By the way, just got my invite to Steve and Cindy’s wedding, thinking Mary will be my PLUS one. Should be a great time, but there’s NO way I would TRADE it for your guys’ wedding. What a blast. Anyway, Merry Christmas – hope Santa CLAUS treats you well – and talk soon about absolutely only permissible topics.
