Seattle Mariners: Reasons to Love/Hate the James Paxton acquisition
Strategic Fans
For the truly strategic fan, it’s tough to like this acquisition. It’s not about the money or the one-year contract. It’s about the ripple effects. Acquiring James Paxton will force the Mariners to find a new home for Nick Margevicius, one of the likely odd men out.
Paxton joins a Seattle Mariners starting rotation that already features three lefties that are established parts of the 2021 rotation. Marco Gonzales, Yusei Kikuchi (have to keep him, he’s the highest-paid starter the Mariners have), and Justus Sheffield (coming off his best season yet). Margevicius is also left-handed, and going into the season with five lefties would be a nightmare.
Seattle also has some right-handers ready for the rotation. One will be winter free agent signee Chris Flexen (his contract basically demands it). The other is likely Justin Dunn who has command issues. Even so, he is likely to start the season in the rotation. This also cracks the door a bit for Logan Gilbert or George Kirby potentially to jump ahead of Dunn. But that means Seattle would destroy Dunn’s value in the process.
The worst-case scenario for the Mariners would be that Paxton is healthy at the trade deadline and performs well. The sentimental fan won’t like this, but the reality is that strategically a healthy Paxton means that the M’s are going to win games until he’s injured. He will be injured, follow the history.
- 2014 lat strain.
- 2015 strained tendon – middle finger.
- 2016 arm fatigue.
- 2017 strained pectoral muscle.
- 2018 back injury.
- 2019 knee injury.
- 2019 sore glute.
- 2020 surgery to remove a cyst from his back.
To sum up, that’s seven MLB seasons and eight trips to the Injured List (IL). If Paxton waits until after the trade deadline for his annual injury, then the hopes of ending the post-season drought will be in jeopardy.
Dipoto has a ton of equity built up in the farm system (Ranked #2 by Baseball America). Not all of their prospects will work out. Being at or just above five hundred at the trade deadline could cause Dipoto to make some deals that hurt the team’s long-term trajectory.
There are many other scenarios that the strategic fan is mulling over right now. Still, one that the MLB Network brought up in the Top 100 Prospects show on Saturday, February 13, was that the Mariners are the only AL West team in the top 25, and that should signal a significant shift in the division for 2022 and beyond. Trading away assets towards that effort would be an egregious offense against the rebuild strategy.