The new trend we are talking about is the glorification of the “salary dump”, where franchises worth billions of dollars owned by some of the wealthiest men in the world, cry poor and tell their GM’s to trade away some largely unmoveable and almost always, bad contracts. The Mariners did something similar with Robinson Cano last year.
Now to be fair, my description is a bit simplistic of the idea as a whole, but let’s focus on the baseball aspect of things and ignore the business side for a moment. Whether or not teams should be doing it, they are and this is where GM Jerry Dipoto can take advantage.