The Mariners bullpen shuffles for unexpectedly gnarly reasons.
The Seattle Mariners announced Friday that they have placed RHP Trent Thornton on the 15-day injured list for pitchers with appendicitis. In his place, they have recalled RHP Troy Taylor from Triple-A Tacoma.
Thornton has struggled massively this season, after a respectable 2024 with fairly heavy usage that saw him appear in nearly half of Seattle’s games for a 3.61/3.47 ERA/FIP and 0.6 fWAR. He featured his best strikeout numbers of his career, and a K-BB% at 19.7%. This year, that’s dropped to 10.8%, coming purely from a nearly 10% drop in strikeout rate from 26.2% to 16.9%. His velocity has been down just a tick, and his pitch mix has more heavily featured a firm cutter in lieu of his slider-first approach a season ago. That cutter has been brutalized, and so has Thornton, whose 5.87/6.89 ERA/FIP and -0.6 fWAR neatly cancel out his efficacy from all of last season in just 15.1 IP.
To his credit, Thornton has had a few extremely strong line holds this season to actual level out his WPA. He’ll now hopefully experience a brief healing respite while handling one of the nastier common medical maladies in appendicitis. Depending on the nature of his appendicitis and its treatment, Thornton could be down for anywhere from the minimum 15 days up to a month and change.
In his place is Taylor, an apt 1-1 swap of players whose repertoires are solid but can get absolutely devoured by the home run bug if they’re not careful. Taylor’s stuff was great last year, and looks to be recovering nicely from his lat strain that waylaid his spring progression this year. However, the rust has shown, as he struggled to generate outs in Seattle and has been sent down a couple times already. In Tacoma, Taylor’s been missing bats and avoiding walks, demonstrating a great capacity for what you’d like to see from the young fireballer. Except… he’s also gotten clobbered on anything that contact is made on, with a 50% HR/FB rate and a .450 BABIP allowed culminating in a hilarious 7.36/5.10/2.52 ERA/FIP/xFIP. I expect better from Taylor this go around, as the whiffs and walks are stickier than that pesky home run rate.