They’ll Love Arozarena in Seattle…

Nobody likes to see teams send their most heroic postseason heroes onward. Sometimes that happens when the most recent of their postseason heroics are still in full rearview mirror view. That stings the deepest.

So maybe the Rays did their fans a favor by sending Randy Arozarena to the Mariners long after the postseason postings that made his name disappeared from rearview sight. But it's a small favor. And, depending upon the net results of the haul they got in return, it might not even prove that much of a favour.

Once up as high as 10 games atop the American League West, the Mariners have since gone 11-20 as the formerly-moribund Astros reheated enough to take the division lead by a full game. Losing a 10-game lead in a 24-game stretch was unprecedented. No team before them ever blew that fat a lead that soon.

Arozarena's season began slumping until he re-heated before the trade, but he hasn't factored in the Mariners fortunes just yet, even if they took a pair from the White Sox after making the deal. The Mariners have the patience of Job when it comes to waiting for his full emergence in their silks.

They sent the Rays two prospects with upside enough if you consider the Rays' ability to shape players, minor league outfielder Aidan Smith and pitcher Brody Hopkins. The Rays had better hope they can forge that pair into more than just replacement-level major leaguers. Arozarena was worth about a hundred times that much from the moment his 2020 coming-out party began.

Arozarena picked up one hit on Saturday but then went 2-for-4 with a run scored in Sunday's 6-3 Mariners win. He beat an infield hit out in the first to score almost promptly on Cal Raleigh's immediately-following home run, then he beat another infield hit out to load the bases with two out in the second only to be stranded there.

"He's really loved by his teammates and fans," said Mariners outfielder Luke Raley, himself an Arozarena teammate in Tampa Bay for two seasons, "and he's going to be a fun addition for sure. He's the low heart-beat kind of guy. He's just made for the big moment. Late in the game, you need a big hit, you want Randy at the plate."

Raley spoke after the Mariners demolished the bottom-crawling White Sox 10-0 Friday night. He even revealed Mariners president Jerry Dipoto consulted him on Arozarena before pulling the proverbial trigger on the deal. "I kind of gave him a three-, four-minute spiel about my thoughts and the things that [Arozarena] does," Raley said. "You try to explain it, but it's really hard — because until you see it, you don't fully understand it. But he just is like a bright star."

This is the effervescent who defected from Cuba in a rowboat and was first signed by the Cardinals. A year before that coming-out party, Arozarena made what some call a mistake and others call serious. When the Cardinals destroyed the Braves 13-1 in 2021 National League Division Series Game Five, manager Mike Schildt broke into a postgame rant that left himself and his team resembling sore winners:

They [the Braves] started some (excrement). We finished the (excrement. And that's how we roll. No one (fornicates) with us ever. Now, I don't give a (feces) who we play. We're gonna (fornicate) them up. We're gonna take it right to them the whole (fornicating) way. We're gonna kick their (fornicating) ass.

Schildt's rant went viral thanks to Arozarena capturing it on video and sending it there. Once the rejoinders went flying in earnest, he couldn't wait to take the video offline. The only place the Cardinals went from there was to a four-game sweep out of that National League Championship Series by a team of Nationals whose manager was smart enough not to say they were going to [fornicate] the Astros up in the World Series — they simply did it, in seven thrilling games.

A cynic might suggest the Cardinals waiting to trade Arozarena to the Rays the following January was a matter of not wanting it to look as though they were teaching him a lesson about impudent videomaking. But their loss was the Rays' gain, once baseball resumed after the long enough and weird enough pan-damn-ic shutdown. The Rays hit the expanded postseason running. Arozarena hit it exploding.

He hit 10 home runs to smash Hall of Famer Derek Jeter's record for a single postseason. He set a single-postseason record with 29 hits. He was named that American League Championship Series most valuable player. Perhaps fittingly, too, he slammed the exclamation point down upon one of the weirdest and wildest World Series game-ending walkoff hits in Game 4.

Arozarena was on first in the ninth when pinch-hitter Brett Phillips singled Kevin Kiermaier home with the tying run. Except that Dodgers center fielder Chris Taylor coming in to field the ball had more eye on Kiermaier and the ball caromed off his glove to his left. Taylor scrambled to retrieve the ball and get it to his cutoff man Max Muncy.

Except that Muncy took the throw past first and wheeled to throw home, but the throw bounded off catcher Will Smith's mitt at the split second Smith began wheeling for a tag on an oncoming Arozarena — who wasn't within two nautical miles of the plate just yet. Arozarena tumblesaulted after tripping and stumble back toward third before righting himself when he saw Smith lacked the ball, diving home and pounding the plate with the palm of his right hand nine times.

The Rays would lose that Series, of course, but Arozarena went from there to become the 2021 American League Rookie of the Year, his rookie status unblemished by his late arrival down the 2020 stretch. He was likely the first ROY to win that award after making himself into a postseason breakout star. And few postseason breakout stars had Arozarena's knack for making even opposing fans take to him.

He was made for the arena. A word that just so happens to be the final three syllables of his surname. But he's also made of more endearingly human things. When he learned he'd been traded, Arozarena delivered a farewell to admire. He slipped into the stands and greeted, shook hands with, and thanked as many fans and stadium workers as he could before departing. No newspaper ad or billboard stuff for him.

Arozarena's likely salary escalation plus the Rays' apparent inability to make any AL East gains prompted the team to move him to Seattle and pitcher Zach Eflin to the Orioles. Closing the book on this season and looking toward next may make baseball sense for the Rays.

"Tampa Bay has been hovering on the edge of the AL playoff picture for nearly the entire season, but a late-season surge wouldn't have been out of the question," says FanGraphs writer Jake Mailhot. "By moving Arozarena at this point in the season, the Rays have indicated that they're more interested in ensuring they're set up well for the future than in hoping for a long-shot playoff run over the next few months."

But sending a franchise icon away — in a year that cost them their $182 million shortstop to administrative leave over an underage sex scandal in the Dominican Republic — stings even more. The Rays may lead the Show in frugality, but don't think for a nanosecond that they entered 2024 intending to change Arozarena's home address just yet.

They're not the first to think they had to move such an icon, of course. But depending on what's to come the rest of this season and most of next, Rays fans may yet come to see the Arozarena trade as comparable to that of the Mets trading Hall of Famer Tom Seaver to the Reds in 1977. Breaking hearts and backs and what was left of a franchise's spirit alike.

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