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The big thing is that Jack Z seems to be a sniper. He is trying to operate with razor-fine accuracy in almost every axiom of the baseball roster tango; draft, international amateurs, FAs, trades, et. al. It's not that we're bringing a knife to a gun fight; we're trying to use the least bullets at a gun fight.
Now, this may be good in the sense that if you hit gold. You might end up with a Franklin Gutierrez or Russell Branyan (who wasn't really a revelation since half the interwebs was screaming for him as a hidden asset anywayas) or David Aardsma or whatever, but the problem is that you HAVE to hit your target straight on. Welcome to the Death Star Trench Run, make sure your proton torpedoes make it in!
My feeling is that *right now* the market inefficiency is a ginormous overvaluing of prospects. Almost every team and every national news outlet talks about how prospects have become super important in the market of expensive FAs, so the Home Team can't trade Awesome Prospect for anything but a HOF Shortstop or All-Star Starter.
So what do the A's and Tigers do? They send out everything they have and sweep in to take all of the players on the market home. They're all in.
Remember that scene in Saving Private Ryan where an American sniper is picking off Nazis but then gets vaporized by a Panzer?
I feel like the M's are the sniper and Billy Beane and Dave Dombrowski are in their Panzers.
Whether they win the war is another question, but right now, all we've got is an X-Wing trying to shoot torpedoes into a 2 meter wide hole.
Yes, I'm mixing up movies as I feel.
At the same time, I think the Mariners are doing things that make it difficult to operate in such a market. I truly feel that the M's end up depreciating some of their prospects by saying they won't trade A, B, C, D & E because we love them and they have cute nicknames and blah, blah, blah... BUT they don't *appear* to be valuing their prospects.
Almost every other team has rumors of "Awesome Prospect is blocked by equally Awesome Veteran, so team may look at Awesome Prospect as ballboy or trade Awesome Veteran for a chalupa" during the offseason. The M's go sign Robinson Cano and sit around with Nick Franklin at MIF as if they're adding a Libero between SS and 2B. All winter it was "What are the M's going to do with Nick Franklin?" and no "The M's like Nick Franklin, so they're going to try him in LF". Now, which looks more legit: screaming the burrito is good or seeing someone devour the burrito as if it's the last piece of food on earth?
Anyways, that's kind of a poorly written spinning account of what I think, but I agree with Doc. I don't really mind the trades, but when it comes down to it, the M's are still not going crazy after the Pennant. They may want to win, but they're not gonna break out the crazy.