Shout out to Ron for finding this originally (it was on the thread about the trade)
https://sports.mynorthwest.com/15958...r-special-bat/
the initial conversations with the Reds about Winker started just after the end of the 2021 season and continued at the GM meetings in November.
[...]
By the time Krall reached out, Hollander said things had changed. Winker was not just a target, he was the target.
“As we spent time on Jesse during the lockout, he just stuck out as the most special bat available at the post-lockout frenzy,” Hollander explained. “Whenever that ended we felt that was a bat that that was not available anywhere else on the market.”
[...]
He [the seattle GM] said he woke up at about 5 and couldn’t get out of his head how we might be able to add Suárez to this deal and how it might help us and some of the mechanics we had talked about,” Hollander recounted. “I walked into his office and he had it all laid out on the board, and then we vetted it through the whole baseball group and then we spent about 30 hours going back and forth with the Reds on different iterations, different names, more players, less players.”