Be careful of what you wish for. I can’t tell you how many emails I have received this winter asking me what was going to happen on the trade front for the Mariners. It is clear that many Mariners fans have been hanging on every piece of information, wanting to know the details not when the deal was complete, but rather wanting to know as they develop.

Well, as I have said before, I think we got an up close look at the early stages of a deal the last two days. With the internet, connections in other countries, plus all of the “unnamed sources” and “sources close to the situation” this was a far cry from a handshake deal over drinks that may have happened years ago. It’s a far cry from Blackberry messages and final phone calls as well. As Tom Glasgow pointed out, if Adam Jones had been sitting on a beach in San Diego we might not have heard about this until the players involved had actually taken their physicals.

This deal has been in the works for a long time. There have been periods of quiet, but the Mariners have been in on Eric Bedard since the Winter Meetings. There are indicators that the dynamics of the negotiations and possible trade have changed often, to the point where I think most of the media in the past few weeks threw their hands up and said enough. It wasn’t worth it to report everything that was heard because given twenty four hours you all of a sudden heard something new. There may have been good information, but then all of a sudden it changed. Or maybe it wasn’t good information. Bill Bavasi himself admitted without naming the Orioles that he thought they were close four or five times the last month. This negotiation has clearly been different and difficult.

So now we wait. There are several reports that if this deal goes through it could be for Adam Jones, George Sherrill and two or three minor league pitchers. Could that change? Absolutely. On the Peter Angelos front, I am not sure how it got from what we heard Sunday night in that he can’t get to the proposal until Tuesday because of a personal issue to what we heard last night in that he’s upset that information leaked out from the Mariners side. And on that note, give Adam Jones a break

If the kid got caught up in an extraordinary situation thousands of miles away from home in a foreign country well cut him some slack. The entire country of Venezuela has been hanging on this final series he has been playing in. It was announced on the broadcast that he was unavailable to his team because he was the subject of a trade. Their media no doubt jumped all over that. If the quotes are correct it sounds like Adam was trying to say the right things. The only thing that he denied saying was that he was traded. I haven’t heard the interview, don’t know if he said the word trade or traded and quite frankly I don’t care. I do care that my words of the possibility that something may have been lost in the translation have by some been attributed to him. He never said that, I did. I posed the possibility because Adam is pretty fluent in Spanish. I knew that he did most of his interviews over there in Spanish, but apparently that one was conducted in English. It appears that he is heading home to Arizona today.

So where do we stand now? Neither side is saying the deal is dead. Andy McPhail tells the Baltimore Sun that he didn’t expect any developments for a couple of days. Bill Bavasi tells the same newspaper that what has been reported is “very, very premature.”
As I said above, I think we got a glimpse into a deal that was very much in the early stages. I think the shades will be drawn now.