The Mariners placed Trent Thornton on the 15-day injured list on Friday, and announced that the right-hander will miss the rest of the season due to a torn left Achilles tendon. Thornton had to be carted off the field after he suffered the injury in the ninth inning of Thursday’s 6-0 M’s win over the Rangers, as the reliever fell while leaving the mound to cover first base on an Adolis Garcia grounder. Follow-up tests revealed the unfortunate and expected news of an Achilles tear, and while a specific recovery timeline isn’t yet known, Thornton could be in jeopardy of missing some time at the start of the 2026 season.
Thornton has a 4.68 ERA over 42 1/3 innings for Seattle this season. A few particularly rough blowups have inflated his ERA, but his 17.8% strikeout rate is well below Thornton’s 26.2 K% from 2024. Owed a raise from his current $2MM salary in his final year of salary arbitration, Thornton will probably still be inexpensive enough that he won’t be non-tendered this winter, barring an unwelcome injury diagnosis. Since coming to the Mariners in a trade from the Blue Jays prior to the 2023 deadline, Thornton has been a workhorse out of Seattle’s pen, with a 3.65 ERA over 140 2/3 innings.
More from around the American League…
- Byron Buxton firmly denied any possibility of a trade away from the Twins back in mid-July, stating that he would use his contract’s no-trade provision to remain “a Minnesota Twin for the rest of my life.” It probably isn’t surprising that Buxton hasn’t changed course just a few weeks later, but in the wake of the Twins’ deadline selloff, Buxton reiterated to the Athletic’s Dan Hayes and other reporters that “nothing’s changed. It’s just part of baseball. It’s the business side of it. Just cause we go through these tough roads or whatever, it is what it is. We’ll be better once we get on the other end of it and figure things out a little bit more….But I ain’t going nowhere.” Buxton is owed roughly $49.6MM through the end of the 2028 season, and he has full no-trade protection until the end of the 2026 campaign.
- Most of the Rays’ deadline moves saw the team obtain either big leaguers or big league-ready talent in return, which was the team’s stated goal in any deal involving controllable talent heading out of Tampa. President of baseball operations Erik Neander told Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that the Rays received “a lot of interest” in some veteran players, but “that wasn’t going to happen for A-ball prospects this time around.” The intention is to keep the team competitive for 2026 but also not robbing this year’s team of a chance to make a late run. The Rays have dug themselves into a hole with their dismal play over the last five weeks, as the club is now 55-58 and sit five games back of the final AL wild card berth.
- Miguel Vargas was a late scratch from Saturday’s White Sox lineup, and the team placed the corner infielder on the 10-day injured list today due to a left oblique strain. While oblique problems are difficult to diagnose in terms of a timeline, Vargas’ strain is believed to be mild, so he could only miss a couple of weeks. A very streaky season has evened out to a 97 wRC+ for Vargas over 439 plate appearances, with 13 home runs and a .229/.305/.402 slash line in Vargas’ first full season in Chicago.