Seattle Mariners: Injuries and ineffectiveness – What Jerry Dipoto needs to do
Injuries and early season ineffectiveness are pushing the envelope on service time situations for Seattle Mariners’ top prospects, Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert.
The Seattle Mariners are barely six games into the season and sitting at .500. It’s still very early. For those that are looking for a reason to sink the Mariners, they don’t have to look far. Also, for those who have analyzed the schedule, you knew this week would be a hard one. The White Sox and Twins represent two of the five teams expected to compete for the American League Championship at the end of the season.
James Paxton
Who had April 6th in the James Paxton injury pool? Congratulations. It was already going to be a tough week, and now it’s about to get harder. Big Maple went down last night with a forearm issue on his throwing arm.
According to some sources, this is similar to the injury that he sustained while with the Yankees last year, but it’s not as severe. In 2020, he was attempting to return from a back injury sooner than he should’ve and suffered the arm injury after a relatively ineffective season.
Paxton is coming off of an incredible spring where he struck out 50 percent of the batters he faced and was well on his way to a possible dominant start Tuesday Night. With one out in the second and a runner on via walk, Paxton suffered the injury. He is likely to end up on the IL for the ninth time in eight seasons. For those of you that played our “over/under” game, it would appear that the under was the safe bet.
Nick Margevicius
Nick Margevicius is a likely replacement for Paxton in the rotation; however, he looked terrible at points last night. He gave up the three-run home run to back-up catcher Zack Collins, then he settled down and cruised for a couple of innings. In the fifth inning, he gave up a two-run home run to Luis Robert to put the White Sox ahead for good.
Margevicius will still get the first shot at replacing Paxton, but LJay Newsome will be on stand-by, with the possibility of Logan Gilbert waiting in the wings?
Losing Paxton means the M’s lose one of two upper 90s starting pitchers (Kikuchi) they have. That leaves Seattle with a lot of soft-tossing lefty pitchers. Strategically it doesn’t make sense to bring Margevicius in after Sheffield and before Dunn.
The “win-now” faction will start the chant for Gilbert to join the big club sooner-than-later and rightfully so. It’s a six-man rotation; he’s not going to burn out his innings. They should get Gilbert up and see what he can do over the course of the season. If the Mariners aren’t in it in September, they can shut him down.