We’re well into Day 3 of the baseball winter meetings in Nashville and the Mariners continue to be the team that is most linked to every available hitter out there without actually landing any of them. One that will not be landed is Billy Butler of the Kansas City Royals, unless teams step up their offers to acquire the slugger.

Royals manager Ned Yost would not be talking like that unless he was pretty certain that Butler was staying put. The Royals have talked to several teams about a Butler deal, but, reading between the lines here, it sounds like nobody was willing to step up and meet their rather steep asking price. We got an indication of that from the Mariners yesterday when they suddenly seemed to shift focus from acquring a 1B/DH type and an outfielder and instead are now exploring the two-outfielder scenario we explored in-depth on the blog and in today’s paper.

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