In ’05, I covered Hernández's first major league start. While interning at The Buffalo News in ’01, I often stayed late to input one of the Mariners’ record 116 wins into the agate section, remaining in tune to their magic. slide into home in the 1995 playoffs made me want to write about sports, to capture moments and uncover meanings. I can trace my career through the baseball team I followed growing up and our brief but perpetually intersecting history. But these pieces started to resemble a Mad Libs exercise. As the longest playoff drought in professional sports grew longer, I wrote about Seattle’s baseball team in The Seattle Times, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I had taken that approach an embarrassing number of times before. Then, the story idea landed in my inbox a few months back: could we write about the Mariners’ latest overhaul? On instinct, I cringed. The Mariners managed to snag both, dumping the contract and receiving outfielder Jarred Kelenic, who would soon develop into a top-five prospect. A fortunate team that desires an extreme makeover would seek either future talent in exchange for its best players or financial assistance that would allow for flexibility in long-term maneuvering. For a one-inning closer and an aging former star player he was ready to move on from, Dipoto managed to turn one breakfast into two pillars for the rebuild he knew, deep down, he needed to embark on. Even though Díaz was popular and could sling fastballs around 100 miles per hour, Dipoto didn’t mind because that structure emboldened him to ask for more in return. The Mets pushed for the inclusion of closer Edwin Díaz as the deal’s centerpiece, with Canó-and his paychecks-thrown in. Plus, surely no other executive in baseball valued Canó as much as Van Wagenen did. More teams turned to this approach after the Cubs and Astros each famously endured long periods of losing in order to win World Series titles. And Van Wagenen, who had never before worked in a front office, was hired precisely because he promised ownership that he wouldn’t go through the tank-and-rebuild process that so many other wayward franchises were doing with varying levels of success. Needed to win now, always, especially when they weren’t winning. The Mets, despite their tortured history, played in New York. Van Wagenen occupied a difficult position, as a new GM for a team in a major market that hardly ever engaged in any sort of overhaul.

Manipulation card game rules