You both make sense to me.
On a side note, if the Orioles pick up Fowler, they're going to be over $160 million, bigosh bigolly. Does my heart good to see them and the Royals spending money. Heck, even the Marlins, in their serially incompetent manner, have been spending money, if herki-jerkily, over the past few years.
I also wanted to add that I don't really believe in this "window of opportunity" meme. A healthy and vibrant baseball organization should yearly be coughing up 2-3 guys to the major-league team, plus 2-5 blocked guys for trade bait. So, yeah, I get that people are talking about big contracts and the team's ability to add around them. But then the window really refers to our perception of the team's willingness and ability to pay out for another big contract.
Everything else is constantly changing-actually, even that changes, as we see from my examples above. But my larger point is that I think the other variables are too numerous and potent to say that any team will be or should be declining at a certain point in time. To wit,
What if--
-Walker and Paxton both become legit #1s who re-sign/extend with Seattle?
-Zunino emerges along with Marte and Powell, and M's are rock-solid up the middle for the foreseeable future?
-Etc. That's two somewhat plausible potential scenarios just from a small pile of the few facts we know. For all we know, the M's Great Breakout Guys of 2018 are already in the system (O'Neill, the Jacksons?) (SMILEY FACE). I think that a dynamic GM such as DiPoto should never let a team's window close.