Major League Baseball

Seattle Mariners Designate Leonys Martin For Assignment

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 1:56 p.m. ET

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Fansided, Jason Burke/FanSided via Call to the Pen

The Seattle Mariners are definitely not where they were hoping to be through the season's first three weeks at 8-12 and in the cellar in the AL West. With that, changes had to be made to the roster, and Leonys Martin has been DFA'd.

In a corresponding move, the Seattle Mariners brought up Dan Vogelbach, whom they acquired from the Chicago Cubs around the trade deadline last year for Mike Montgomery, while Danny Valencia continues to struggle while primarily manning first.

Leonys Martin has started off the 2017 season by batting .111 through 58 plate appearances and held a -13 wRC+ and a -0.5 fWAR. That is an extremely rough start, but Martin has always been a defense first outfielder that provides little at the plate. Over the course of a full season, the best wRC+ that he has put up in his career is 91, which is still nine percent below league average.

That said, Leonys Martin has typically finished as a generally decent player due to his defensive abilities. The year that he tallied that 91 wRC+, back in 2014, he was a 3.6 fWAR player. The lowest fWAR that he has accumulated while playing over 100 games has been a 2.2, which happened last season, his first with Seattle.

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The 29-year-old outfielder is signed for 2017 at $4.85M, so passing him through waivers to get him back to Triple-A Tacoma shouldn't be terribly hard with so much money attached. Whether or not the Mariners want to make a trade becomes the real question here.

The Giants, who fielded an outfield consisting of Gorkys Hernandez, Denard Span and Chris Marrero on Saturday night due to the mounting injuries on their roster, could be a team that has interest in any outfielder with a pulse. Span was injured running into a wall in that game (the second time a Giant outfielder has been injured running into a wall while playing the Rockies and Matt Moore was on the mound in under a week), so their depth is slim at the moment. First baseman Brandon Belt travelled out to man left on Sunday while a banged up Hunter Pence played in right.

The Giants need help, and the Mariners could be in a position to help them out.

However, Seattle GM Jerry Dipoto spent his entire offseason adding players that could offer incremental upgrades over the players he had on the roster. He also added depth to numerous spots on his roster. So a trade could really work out both ways here. Either the Mariners will end up keeping that depth, or they will start using some of that depth to acquire different talent that could pay dividends later on.

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