Mariners blatantly kick the Luis Castillo can down the road with rotation plans

If Luis Castillo wasn't Luis Castillo, he would have flamed out of the Seattle Mariners' starting rotation by now. But therein lies the problem. He is Luis Castillo, and that appears to have bought him some time as part of the club's plan for reintroducing Bryce Miller.

On Sunday, the Mariners dropped the news that Miller will be coming off the injured list this Wednesday against the Astros in Houston. That will give them six healthy starters, and their plan to deal with it is to go to a six-man rotation… but only for now, as Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times says the team is leaning toward using some sort of piggyback arrangement in the near future.

With the Mariners three games into a stretch of 13 games in 13 days, a six-man rotation is a good way to navigate the short-term. But whereas it might have made sense for the long-term once upon a time, that notion was based on an assumption that everyone would be able to contribute.

To this end, Castillo has become the ball and chain around the rotation's ankle. That he's a three-time All-Star and respected veteran still matters, but what's relevant now is that he's an aging pitcher who's allowed 32 runs over his last 32.1 innings.

Hiding Luis Castillo might be the best thing the Mariners can do right now

It's hard to overstate just how not misleading Castillo's results are. He has a 6.57 ERA through eight starts precisely because he's tracking toward numerous career worsts, including:

• 5.74 xERA
• .372 xwOBA
• 20.8 K%
• 92.6 mph Exit Velocity
• 51.6 HardHit%
• 12.1 Barrel%

The 33-year-old recently showed that he can still run his fastball up to 98 mph, but his velocity hasn't changed much from last season despite offseason efforts to regain a tick or two. And that's a problem, as his 2nd-percentile extension on his release point makes whatever he throws look slower.

Given his pedigree and the fact that he usually gets off to slow starts, the best argument for sticking with Castillo is that he's bound to figure it out. Yet there was always going to come a point where he would age out of the benefit of the doubt, and all the evidence says that point has arrived.

This could be why the Mariners are openly planting seeds for fans to expect Castillo's role in the rotation to be downgraded. If he's merely a piggyback starter, that would reduce expectations for any given start from five or six good innings to three or four good innings. If this is how it must be, our only note is that Emerson Hancock would be a better piggyback partner than Miller.

Even better, though, would be if Castillo was reduced to not even a piggyback starter, but something more like an opener.

He has been better early in games, but "early" in this case means the first inning and between his first pitch and his 25th pitch. That's a guy you're happy to trust for one inning, but no more than that — especially, that is, if Miller shows he's just as good a bet for a quality start as Hancock, Logan Gilbert, George Kirby and Bryan Woo.

This isn't even the hardest decision the Mariners could make on Castillo. Hypothetically, they could move him to the bullpen or just plain strip him of a role altogether, be it with an IL stint, a trade or even (Gasp!) a DFA that would require eating his remaining $24.15 million salaries for 2026 and 2027.

All of those, of course, are nuclear options. Yet even if Mariners aren't there yet, they're clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel for their non-nuclear options with Castillo.

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