In sports, you have the regular season, the playoffs (or post-season), and the off-season. Sometimes people call the playoffs the "second season." Perhaps it's time now to talk about the supposed off-season at the third season.
When the Mariners were sort of floating around an even .500 record in June and then went on a streak of 17-consecutive losses (a streak with odds of 1 in 500... if the team was only playing .300 ball), a lot of the talk turned to the off-season. A lot of folks, seeing the struggling Mariners offense that finished last in runs scored in 2011 (and 2010, and third to last in 2009... you get the point), decided that the team needed to target Prince Fielder, heavy hitting--pun intended--first baseman from Milwaukee in order to fix it.
A lot of people like Prince Fielder, and word is the Mariners do, too. That's fine, but Fielder cannot be the entirety of the answer. Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp actually had the most home runs of any player in the National League. In fact, Matt Kemp nearly won baseball's batting Triple Crown (most home runs, highest batting average, and most runs batted in)! Not only that, but Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw won the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in the league. The Dodgers went 82-79, just barely above .500. Signing one excellent player doesn't fix a team. Hell, two excellent players doesn't fix a team. The 1996 Mariners had Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez on the team, who were the two best players in baseball (according for Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement. It's esoteric, but stick with me), and still managed to miss the playoffs.
The real question is if you can sign Prince Fielder and still upgrade the rest of the team to a point where the team as a whole is legitimately good. In the Mariners case, pretty much everything that's not second base and shortstop could use an upgrade. To the M's credit, they should manage some upgrade without lifting a finger; young players at first base and left field should develop into better players, and their center fielder Franklin Gutierrez figures to be healthier in 2012 than in 2011. Ichiro might bounce back, depending on what you think of his skills and his age. That said, I don't think the young players at third base are ready, and development isn't as predictable as we would hope.
Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times posted an entry to his Mariners blog that the team has more money to spend than we think. That article posits that teams could open up their budgets and not be "crippled by big contracts," which is a concern of a lot of people who are (at least somewhat) against the potential Prince Fielder signing. Thing is, most teams don't open up their budgets. The Mariners spent $117M on the 2008 roster that lost 100 games. When you don't get any success out of spending money, you have to wonder why you should spend good money after bad.
The other problem is, well, who's available? A lot of the available players this off-season seem to be more or less average. In certain cases, average is a lot better than what the M's have, but it's also difficult to want to spend a lot of money on an average player when there's a chance you can develop one for a lot cheaper.
There's a lot of risk putting a ton of money into one player. If that player gets hurt, doesn't age gracefully, or has any number of other problems, the team is stuck and still has to spend the money. There's basically one team that regularly outspends its mistakes: the Yankees. The Red Sox could fall into this, too, but it's an order of magnitude smaller. The Red Sox' apparent mistakes in spending cost them the playoffs in 2011.
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