Mariners Pitcher Zach Lee Taken By Padres Via Waiver Claim

The Mariners have lost their latest player due to the waiver wire. This time it was the struggling pitcher, Zach Lee that was snatched from Seattle. Lee is heading to the San Diego Padres, just a short trip from the team that drafted him.

According to Bob Dutton of The News Tribune, the San Diego Padres have snagged Zach Lee from the Mariners via the waiver wire.

Lee’s time with the Mariners was short-lived and very unproductive.

The M’s picked Lee up in a mid-season trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers, but he never dawned a Mariners uniform, and never won a game, even at the triple-A level.

When Lee was traded, he went straight to the triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, where he would start fourteen games. In those more than a dozen starts, he would lose nine decisions and amassed an incredibly high ERA of 7.39.

He performed so poorly, so consistently. He allowed a run in all of his fourteen appearances and surrendered four or more runs in nine of those games. His season-high of runs given up was nine.

He was also allowing a tremendous amount of extra-base hits. In seventy-four innings pitched, Lee gave up thirty-one extra-base knocks including eighteen doubles, eleven triples, and four home runs.

And while he wasn’t playing at the major league level, if we compare his 0-9 record when having played at least thirteen games in a season, we see that Lee joins a group of only sixteen deplorable pitchers in the modern era that are only remembered in history because they never won a game in a given year.

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Only three men since 1901 have ever lost more games in a single season without earning a win while taking the mound at least a baker’s dozen worth of times.

The last player to do so was Terry Felton of the Minnesota Twins back in 1982. He lost an MLB-worst thirteen games without garnering a W.

The Mariners didn’t expect this type of dismal performance from a player that has always been ranked in the top one hundred prospects since he was drafted by the Dodgers in the first round in 2010. The M’s even had him listed as the twenty-seventh best man in their farm system.

And they definitely didn’t expect him not to earn a single win. Before 2016, Lee had won at least six games when taking the mound for any of the Dodgers minor league affiliates.

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Lee may turn out to be a star, like he was expected to be when he was drafted, but it won’t happen with the Mariners organization. He’ll be heading back to California, just over one hundred miles away from his old stomping grounds to try and revamp his waning career.