> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Mariners’ Tuesday Bombshells: Rotating Piggyback, Pereda Sent Down, Arozarena to IL - URL: https://www.emeraldcityspectrum.com/seattle-mariners-bombshells-piggyback-pereda-arozarena/ - Published: 2026-06-17T06:39:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T06:11:21.000Z - Author: Callaghan Bluechel - Tags: Analysis, Mariners, Justin Hollander, Dan Wilson, Jhonny Pereda, Randy Arozarena, Luis Castillo, Bryce Miller, Bryan Woo, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Emerson Hancock, Mitch Garver, Rob Refsnyder, Cal Raleigh \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="5427"\] ![ Jerry Dipoto looks on before game one of the ALDS round between the Seattle Mariners and Detroit Tigers for the 2025 MLB playoffs at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/jerry-dipoto-format-original.jpg) Jerry Dipoto looks on before game one of the ALDS round between the Seattle Mariners and Detroit Tigers for the 2025 MLB playoffs at T-Mobile Park. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images \[/caption\] Tuesday ended in a solid 3-1 win for the Mariners at home against the Orioles, but a flurry of roster moves and decisions may have been even more hectic for the team than that night’s action. The team called Cal Raleigh back up to the MLB roster, announced a first-of-its-kind rotating piggyback, and had to call up a guy who had taken four total plate appearances above High-A ball in his entire career thanks to a seemingly bizarre lack of preparation on Randy Arozarena’s injury status. Mariners general manager Justin Hollander, speaking with media Tuesday afternoon, noted the inordinate severity of the injury situation as compared to other bugs he had dealt with in his tenure with the team; he noted that Luke Raley and Josh Naylor were both dealing with issues and that Matt Brash, Carlos Vargas, and Cooper Criswell would be out until around the trade deadline. Brendan Donovan is set to start running work in the week, but these persistent injuries are not a good sign. This is especially true of Raley’s lower back tightness, given that similar injuries ended up shattering his 2025 season well after he was officially healed. The mechanistic plan to have each of Seattle’s six starting pitchers rotate the piggyback amongst themselves is many things, but to use a judgmentally neutral term, it is unprecedented. It is also seemingly contradictory that the same organization that came up with a plan as intricate as a rotating piggyback also waited until a gameday to MRI Arozarena despite having a rest day to do so; had they done the simple thing of scheduling an earlier MRI, they would have been able to call Connor Joe back up as is clearly their long-term plan. But what’s done is done, as bizarre as the events were. What should be made of these decisions, and what do they mean for the near future of the Mariners’ season? ### Reinventing the wheel, almost. It seems that the Mariners organization will do almost anything to avoid making one of their starters into a full-time reliever - the organization’s issue being that there would be a lengthy transition period from reliever back to starter in the case they need someone - but that clearly hasn’t been the only issue with the team’s starting pitching as guys the team thought of as aces going into the year keep struggling to make it past the sixth. While they ultimately seek to figure out what is causing this (it’s 90% pitch sequencing predictability and the other half is physical, to completely mangle a Yogi Berra quote), they have decided to remedy the two issues by returning to the piggyback, except this time, every dog is going to have its day. Specifically, there will be three piggyback days between Tuesday and the All-Star Break, each pitcher taking part. “We have the six starters, starting on Friday, we’re gonna start a series of three piggybacks between here and the All-Star Break, and we’re asking each of our starters to take one of those,” said Mariners manager Dan Wilson. “I think our guys really have taken to the idea … we talk a lot about that group, and how they work well together, how they lean into each other.” With that in mind, we can construct a plausible scenario for how the team is planning this all out: \[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1348"\] ![ Given the parameters Dan Wilson gave in his pregame interview Tuesday, this is a possible schedule that the M’s could take with the piggybacks before the All-Star Break. The areas of the schedule with a gray overlay represent speculation, as the M’s have only made official scheduling commitments up through Friday. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1d/f2/1df2f77b-83dd-4bc0-a6d2-6d1bb5df89a3/content/images/2026/10/possible-piggyback-schedule-format-original.png) Given the parameters Dan Wilson gave in his pregame interview Tuesday, this is a possible schedule that the M’s could take with the piggybacks before the All-Star Break. The areas of the schedule with a gray overlay represent speculation, as the M’s have only made official scheduling commitments up through Friday. \[/caption\] With Wilson’s statement in mind, the team probably isn’t quite going for a full wheel rotation of piggybacking starters and systematically having the short-rested guy do the second half, instead using the off-days the team will have to allow everyone to get full rest among their piggyback starts. But all this complexity still raises the question: why do the piggyback in the first place? This is the same question that arose during the first spurt of piggybacking. Part of the reason is the starters’ aforementioned struggles later in games, especially facing guys for the third time. But this is a problem that might be more easily and permanently solved by having the pitchers work through the issues that are causing their own inefficiencies. Logan Gilbert gave an example of such an adjustment on Tuesday night: by mixing more fastballs into his two-strike repertoire - and keeping his splitters somewhat close to the zone - he was able to throw the Orioles hitters off-guard and get them to swing on pitches that hitters have spat on inning after inning against the hurler since 2025\. Predictability has a lot to do with each starter’s issues, but the way that applies is different for each one. And it’s not like every starter has been struggling, though most have. Bryce Miller, for example, has been lock-down solid ever since returning from injury, and his effective and unpredictable mix has stood out from his peers in that he isn’t overrelying on one pitch (as, for example, Hancock had been in the leadup to his D.C. clunker). That is why Miller will be the one starting on Friday, but beyond that, there are many ways for the team to organize three piggyback games into their upcoming 25 contests. The piggyback does mitigate the team’s massive bullpen injury issues, but so would moving Luis Castillo to the bullpen. That move would also allow Castillo (or whoever else, given that the team is spreading the load among the starters; granted, that aspect may have been a way to get the whole starting core on board) to be used flexibly like a reliever rather than rigidly as a quasi-starter. Ultimately, they just have to win the games, and everything else will sort itself out. ### Did the team make the right decision to demote Pereda instead of demoting Garver or DFAing Refsnyder? Cal Raleigh’s absence from the major league roster while he recovered from an oblique injury meant that the catching duties were split between Mitch Garver and Jhonny Pereda. While 2026 is Garver’s third year with the team, Pereda had just been called up for the second time with the team, originally third in the catching depth chart behind Raleigh and Garver. But Pereda exceeded expectations during Raleigh’s absence, slashing .259/.317/.362 between May 15 and June 14 and nabbing four out of 13 attempted base-stealers (a 30.8% caught stealing rate) during that timeframe. Garver, during that same period, had a .238/.319/.476 slash while throwing out one of every 14 swipers (a 7.1% caught stealing rate). From these figures at the top of the line, the decision on who to demote when Raleigh returned seemed to be one between Garver’s more potent offense and Pereda’s more effective defense. But catching runners lacking is far from the only job of a catcher behind the dish, and a month’s worth of production isn’t as pertinent to a team’s decision-making as what that performance says about *future* performance. So did the Mariners make the correct decision in sending Pereda back down to Triple-A on Tuesday? Defensively, Pereda has the advantage in catching runners and in framing while Garver is the better ABS challenger, netting 0.8 runs over expected on 13.4 overturns over expected compared to Pereda’s ABS challenging has given a return of *\-1.5* runs vs. expected on -5.9 overturns over expected; in other words, Pereda’s lack of precise challenging has cost the M’s roughly a run and a half in a month. This is in terms of run expectancy - how many runs are scored on average from a given count-bases-outs combination - but that tends to even out over time, giving an accuracy to these numbers. Moving over to offense, we see that, underlying the actual production, Pereda had a much better expected output to Garver, measured in something called expected weighted on base average (xwOBA). This is a version of weighted on base average (wOBA) that excludes fielder positioning, wind, and hit direction; wOBA itself can perhaps be best understood as a more precise version of OPS that is scaled to the values of on-base percentage. With the explanations out of the way, Pereda’s xwOBA during the season is .346 compared to Garver’s .301, suggesting that Pereda’s lower production was a product of bad luck on his part. Both were roughly similar on contact, with Garver having a .347 xwOBA on contact and Pereda .356, but Garver strikes out quite a bit more (29.9% of the time to Pereda’s 16.2%). There is also the predictive aspect. Expected stats are still *descriptive* in that although they may take out certain elements of the play, they still give you the (spray-neutral, weather-neutral, etc.) facts of what has actually happened. Predictive measures, though mostly still in their infancy, aim to measure what the physical characteristics of a play say about that player’s future performances. Tom Tango’s [predictive wOBA](https://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/article/introducing-predictive-woba?ref=emeraldcityspectrum.com) (pwOBA), though still incomplete in its non-contact elements, offers an interesting look into this concept. The basic idea is that while a hard-hit pop-up and a hard-hit line drive have vastly different real outcomes and expected outcomes, they aren’t all that different from a mechanical standpoint; an inch more accurate of a swing turns the one into the other. It can sometimes offer a glimpse of players that are an adjustment away from improvement. Garver, who tends to hit plenty of hard hit flares at high degrees, has a pwOBA on contact of .419 compared to .349 for Pereda, indicating the potential for greater production. But at the same time, it is still a very imperfect metric, despite its greater correlation to future production than expected metrics. Fly ball hitters often truly have an aspect of their swing that means there will be more of these hard hit flares than you might expect in a vacuum. And the decision to keep with Garver probably had little to do with predictive metrics at the plate, but rather with his experience managing the pitching staff and in his game-calling ability. Pereda lacked a notable bit of that familiarity and intuitive understanding of his pitchers’ warning signs, perhaps an under-the-radar reason for some of the May blowups. Should the M’s have gone with three catchers and simply gotten rid of Rob Refsnyder, though? With the conclusion of Tuesday’s game, Refsnyder has a .144/.216/.244 slash line in 103 plate appearances. There’s definitely an argument for trying to have Garver be the right-handed DH instead of Refsnyder, but the Mariners already tried that for two years and it ended up being a flop. Refsnyder has been worse, but the M’s also want to have the positional flexibility to play him in the outfield (remember their aforementioned shorthandedness!). Garver has two minor league options remaining to Pereda’s then-one, now-zero, but his experience plus the positional flexibility - whatever may be said of the prioritization - made the M’s choose to demote the younger catcher. There is always the possibility, too, that Refsnyder’s worst is behind him. The struggling hitter has gone 6-21 (.286) since May 26, and a continued spell of solid play would inch up his season production towards a more respectable level. But a hitter with peaks of solid play and valleys of horrific performance doesn’t average out to be a useful player much at all. If he falls back in a rut, there may be no choice but to find another option. ### Mariners seemingly mishandled Randy Arozarena’s MRI scheduling, overconfident in a good result. Perhaps an organization as long-accursed as the Mariners would do well do remember Murphy’s Law. In a more neutral framing, it’s always a good idea to get ahead of anything that can come to bite you in the neck, and as regarded Randy Arozarena’s MRI, the team was apparently too confident in a good result that would allow him to return to at least substitute-ready capacity on Tuesday’s game. But that MRI showed more inflammation than expected, and with Raley and Naylor also out of commission for the day at least, they needed someone up there in case things got hairy. “Every opinion from our medical people on how Randy was testing out indicated to us that he was very likely trending in the right direction and was a real possibility to be available tomorrow. Obviously, the MRI cast doubt on that,” Hollander noted. “We don’t anticipate him to stay on the IL longer than the minimum, but we can’t play with three people short for any range of time.” The Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, the usual funnel for replacements, were playing in Salt Lake City, so Joe wasn’t going to be able to be up in time. The team ended up promoting Curtis Washington (an outfielder from High-A Everett) to the MLB team, and they moved Will Wilson to the 60-day injured list to make room for him on the 40-man roster. Washington didn’t end up in the game and so his debut will have to wait, with Joe likely to replace him on Wednesday. It’s unclear whether something else got in the way of scheduling an MRI. Any such logistical reason for that snafu would obviously be a better reflection on the organization than what ended up happening with Arozarena, but for now, there is little but speculation. Arozarena is still likely to return as soon as eligible, Hollander said, but that still leaves the team without him for about a week.