Seattle Mariners fans laugh at report that St. Louis Cardinals are interested in pitcher Logan Gilbert: "Why would Seattle trade him?" 

Seattle Mariners fans are getting quite a chuckle out of a report that the St. Louis Cardinals are interested in trading for pitcher Logan Gilbert.

Gilbert, in his third season with the Mariners, is 7-5 with a 3.66 ERA and 106 strikeouts this year. For his major league career, he is 26-16 with a 3.75 ERA and 408 whiffs.

The Seattle Mariners made Logan Gilbert the 14th pick of the 2018 MLB draft. The 26-year-old is not arbitration eligible until 2025 and can't file for free agency until 2028. He is making just $767,000 this season.

Mariners fans have no idea how the Cardinals believe that Seattle will part with a quality pitcher under team control for several more seasons without giving up a large haul of players and prospects.

However, reports also note that St. Louis is not willing to give up any of the team's top hitters from the core of its team.

Poor pitching — among other factors — has set the St. Louis Cardinals on a path towards finishing with the team's worst record in a century. The team's winning percentage is just .422. If that pace holds over the second half of the season, it would be tied for the 19th-worst record in the 142-year history of the organization. Not since 1924 has St. Louis seen their Cardinals be this atrocious.

St. Louis had a rough patch in the 1990s, finishing 70-92 in 1990, 62-81 in 1995 and 73-89 in 1997. But all three of those seasons pale in comparison with the dumpster fire that the Cardinals are in 2023.

Logan Gilbert is one of the Seattle Mariners "big three" starting pitchers, along with Luis Castillo and George Kirby. After a slow start, the Mariners are climbing up the standings in the American League West. Seattle enters the second half with a 45-44 record, six games behind the division-leading Texas Rangers.

Logan Gilbert would drastically improve the St. Louis Cardinals' rotation should they somehow pry him away from the Seattle Mariners. Adam Wainwright is retiring from the Cardinals after this season, and most of the rest of the rotation is in tatters.

St. Louis Cardinals likely unable to pry Logan Gilbert away from the Seattle Mariners

Logan Gilbert of the Seattle Mariners celebrates a complete-game shutout against the San Francisco Giants.

The Mariners are four games out of the wild-card placements in the American League as the second half of the season begins. A trade of Gilbert to the St. Louis Cardinals — or anyone else — would have to drastically improve Seattle elsewhere for the gaping hole it would leave in the team's pitching staff.