Infield Shift: Mariners Surprise Buyers With Addition of Jack Wilson, Ian Snell

The news of Jack Wilson heading to Seattle dropped out of the sky like a hammer early Wednesday afternoon.

Everyone knows the Pirates are rebuilding, but it was a real surprise to see Wilson headed to Seattle. The Mariners adding veterans and payroll? Are they actually buyers at this deadline?

That's certainly the initial impression here. Wilson is one of the best defensive shortstops in the league and he's having one of the best defensive seasons of his career at the age of 31. He's not a great hitter, but he's got a better bat than Yuniesky Betancourt, who manned short for Seattle for most of this year.

Given Wilson's age and his pending free agency (the Mariners also inherit an expensive $8.4 million team option for 2010), it seems that this trade has to focus on the short-term, especially in light of the news, as first reported by FanHouse's Jeff Fletcher, that Jarrod Washburn is off the market.

Of course, there's always more than one way of looking at things. It's true that trading away Jeff Clement, plus three minor-league pitchers (at least two of which, in Brett Lorin and Nathan Adcock, seem to have some decent upside) seems like an awfully high price to pay for Wilson and the temperamental Ian Snell, but there is maybe another angle to look at the deal from if we rotate the crystal ball a little bit.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Dejan Kovacevic indicated that the Pirates are going to send a decent amount of cash to Seattle to complete the trade. Given the emphasis that new Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik has put on defense, it might not be a leap of logic to guess that that money will go towards Seattle picking up Wilson's 2010 option.

So we can consider the first half of the trade to be Clement and Ronny Cedeno for Wilson. Clement is the opposite of Wilson. He's all bat and no defense.

After the trade, a scout told Fletcher that Clement "is not a major league catcher."

"It's certain to help [Seattle] in the big leagues. They get two proven guys for a shortstop hitting .175 who is mistake prone," the scout added.

Cedeno is mostly a utility guy, so there's no great loss there. So Zduriencik is trading offense for defense. Given Wilson's age and some recent injury troubles (before 2009, his games played had declined in every year from 2006), it's a risky move, but an understandable one if Wilson's option is exercised.

The second portion of the trade is Ian Snell for the three young pitchers, Brett Lorin, Nick Adcock, and Aaron Pribanic, and it mostly boils down to this: Snell is more talented than any of the three of them and was only marked for an exit from Pittsburgh because he punched his own ticket.

He consistently failed to listen to the coaching staff, apparently demanded his own demotion, and then made it clear that he was happy to be at Triple-A Indianapolis and not in Pittsburgh. If the Mariners can straighten him out, they've managed to acquire themselves a mid-to-top rotation starter that they'll control through 2012, thanks to the options written into Snell's contract.

"Apparently they are [buyers]," said the scout of the Mariners. "It's not a bad idea, with this division. Texas is supsect and the Angels are suspect, so they might as well stay in it as long as they can."

In fact, it seems likely that while Wilson provides some short-term stability at shortstop, this deal was more about getting Snell into the system and giving him a chance to thrive with a change of scenery. If he does that, this deal could be a good one for the Mariners, no matter what happens with the other aspects of the trade.

The Pirates' end of the deal is much simpler; they couldn't afford Wilson's option, making him a pending free agent, and they simply couldn't deal with Snell's shenanigans any longer. So they managed to trade two players with very little value to them for Clement, an interesting young hitter they can try at first base with Adam LaRoche out of the picture.

Like other recent Neal Huntington acquisitions Jose Tabata and Lastings Milledge, Clement was once a highly touted prospect in the Mariners' system who's stock has dropped a bit recently because of his poor defense and a bad showing in the big leagues last year. It seems pretty clear that Huntington is targeting exactly this sort of player to try and bring as much talent into the Pirates' system as cheaply as possible, and he's now been able to take advantage of three such buy-low opportunities in the past 13 months.

A person familiar with the Seattle system told FanHouse's Ed Price it was good trade for Pittsburgh, saying, "Clement will hit. Adcock has good chance to be solid [No.] 4 or 5 [starter]. [Aaron] Pribanic has [a] plus sinker."

Lorin is 6-foot-7 and seems to be coming into his own this year, while Adcock has put up some good minor-league numbers before pitching for Single-A High Desert, which plays in maybe the best hitter's park in the the offensively addled California League. Dealing WIlson will be unpopular with Pirate fans, but overall this move seems like another step in the right direction for the Bucs.