When Jerry Dipoto traded Kendall Graveman for Abraham Toro, Mariners players were livid. Graveman was a clubhouse favorite and the most effective reliever on a team the standings said was right around the playoff hunt. There were a lot of anonymous quotes, but one in particular made me pause, as someone who’d praised the trade:
“He hasn’t come down here. He sits up in his suite, playing fantasy baseball and rips apart our team without telling us anything.”
Baseball’s a business, and it’s also a game, and it’s also players’ lives. It’s all those things. It involves friendships. It involves relationships. And then, to tie it all back together, those relationships impact players’ performance to an unknowable degree. Chemistry is a thing. Its impact is questionable, and possibly small, but it’s unlikely to be meaningless. We just haven’t figured out how to measure it yet.
Anyway, since the trade? The Mariners are 20-17, and their playoff odds have remained relatively constant. Seattle was unlikely to crack the playoff field, and they’re still unlikely to crack the playoff field, but the play hasn’t been demonstrably worse, and Toro’s been a bright spot, with a 141 wRC+ over his 160 plate appearances for the M’s. The chemistry may have been upset, but it’s hard to watch these Mariners play or follow them from afar and get any impression they aren’t trying. The trade seems to have worked, and with Graveman’s contract expiring this offseason and Toro under club control through the 2026 season, it looks likely to continue working for Seattle.
There’s a question here that I’d love to hear Mariners players talk about, anonymously or otherwise, and that’s whether an executive can do the “common enemy” thing in baseball. Are the Mariners fonder of one another thanks to some mutual disdain for Dipoto? On the other side, did Dipoto patch things up with his guys? Or does it not matter? Or does it not matter in this specific case? Or will it matter in the future, when perhaps players will be less willing to work with Dipoto than they’d otherwise be when it comes to things like free agency and extensions?
I don’t know the answer to all of these things. The trade, to me, seems good enough to justify virtually any believable level of clubhouse upheaval, just as it seemed at the time. But I do wonder how it’s shaken out, and how it will continue to shake out. The chemistry piece is one of those currently unknowable things about baseball, and the Graveman/Toro trade fallout is a beefy case study.
