Mariners' 2025 season hangs in the balance after Logan Gilbert forearm injury

The Seattle Mariners are only a month into their 2025 season, yet they've already encountered their third significant injury crisis. And this one is the scariest yet.

In Friday's 8-4 loss to the Miami Marlins, Gilbert pitched the first three innings before, in a rather conspicuous fashion, yielding the mound to reliever Casey Lawrence for the top of the fourth inning.

The Mariners revealed the cause of the 27-year-old ace's early exit to be right forearm tightness:

As Daniel Kramer of MLB.com reported after the game, initial medical reviews revealed "modest" but "not zero" cause for concern. There is optimism that Gilbert's ulnar collateral ligament is intact, yet the team won't have a clear picture of the situation until after an MRI on Saturday.

Losing Logan Gilbert for any length of time would be a serious blow to the Mariners

You could feel the life being drained from the crowd at T-Mobile Park when Lawrence replaced Gilbert on Friday. The team ultimately didn't fare better in this regard, as a sense of powerlessness pervaded as the Marlins put up six runs in the top of the fifth to blow the game open.

Of all the great pitchers the Mariners have developed in recent years, Gilbert is the best since Félix Hernández. The 6-foot-6, 215-pound righty has a 3.55 ERA to show for 127 career starts in the majors, and he had been spending the last calendar year building a case as the best pitcher in baseball.

Durability has been a major part of Gilbert's appeal. He has neither missed a start nor been on the injured list since he debuted in 2021, peaking with 33 outings and a league-leading 208.2 innings in 2024.

This aspect of his reputation is now in jeopardy, and it is hard to find comfort in any of the particulars. Despite the club's purported optimism that Gilbert's UCL is intact, Kramer notes that Gilbert was putting in "far less effort" in his pregame long toss routine. Further, his velocity was noticeably down even before his early exit. Clearly, his forearm tightness was not a sudden, out-of-nowhere thing.

“I felt it a little bit warming up,” Gilbert told Adam Jude of The Seattle Times. “Just never really went away. Sometimes you just get going and it feels a little better. Tonight, it just didn’t.”

As for what happens next, there have been instances where a pitcher was diagnosed with forearm tightness and returned relatively swiftly. In 2022, for example, Zack Greinke landed on the IL with forearm tightness on August 22 and was back on September 7.

Still, even losing Gilbert for a few weeks could have devastating consequences for the Mariners.

Their rotation is already short-handed without George Kirby while he recovers from shoulder inflammation, and it's not exactly firing on all cylinders otherwise. Notably, Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo have gotten off to rocky starts. The Mariners are 14-12 anyway, but starting pitching has simply not been a strength like it was in 2024.

The worst case-scenario is that Gilbert's UCL is revealed to not be intact after all. Forearm tightness can be an early indicator in this regard, as was the case with Texas Rangers ace Jacob deGrom in 2023. He exited a start with forearm tightness in April and ended up needing season-ending elbow surgery in June. He didn't return until the very end of 2024.

As it is, the Mariners have already lost right fielder Victor Robles and second baseman Ryan Bliss to major injuries. As much as their absences hurt, there arguably isn't an extended absence that would threaten to derail the Mariners' season more than one involving Gilbert. There just aren't many guys out there who can match his annual potential for 200 innings and an ERA near or under 3.00.

Discussions about what to do will therefore need to happen if Gilbert's worst-case scenario becomes reality. For the meantime, the only thing Mariners fans can do is the same thing Gilbert and the team are doing: Hope for the best.