Mariners toss life raft to reliever whose KBO makeover failed after MLB stint

Fans of the Seattle Mariners are officially no longer able to say their team has been too quiet to kick off the 2024-25 MLB offseason. On Monday evening, MLB insider Mike Rodriguez reported the club signed Adonis Medina to a minor league contract.

The right-hander will have an invite to big-league spring training in 2025, but it remains to be seen just how great of a threat he'll be to crack the Mariners' Opening Day roster.

Medina, 27, has 19 games and 35 1/3 innings under his belt at the game's highest level, but the vast majority of them haven't gone well. He made five decent-but-not-great appearances for the Phillies in 2020 and 2021 before laying an egg in 2022 on the Mets.

Medina made it into 14 contests that year, surrendering 18 runs (16 earned) on 30 hits, which resulted in a 6.08 ERA and 64 ERA+. He hasn't resurfaced in the big leagues since. In fact, this led to a stint in South Korea in the 2023 campaign. While many ailing big leaguers go overseas to revive their careers, Medina didn't quite get the same results.

His time with the Kia Tigers ended up consisting of 12 starts and just 58 innings. He posted a 6.05 ERA with 36 strikeouts and 29 walks, which is a K/BB walk ratio a bit too similar for comfort. He's always been a hurler that struggles with command and doesn't strike out a ton of batters, which is not a great combination.

Even still, Medina turned this into a 49-game showing with the Nationals' Triple-A affiliate in 2024. His numbers looked much better there, but still didn't jump off the page. A nine-game stretch in the Dominican Winter League spawned a 1.35 ERA across 6 2/3 innings, so it's entirely possible that the Mariners saw something in particular that they liked in Medina's most recent work.

Medina has his work cut out for him to make the Mariners' roster out of spring training next season. The 40-man roster is full of big-league hopefuls, with as many as eight players who spent the majority of their 2024 season in Triple-A who will be fighting for one of the few available roster spots. This is all without taking external additions into consideration, too.

Seattle should be one of the busier teams in free agency this offseason, so the more faces they bring in, the harder of a time Medina will have seeing the light of day at the big-league level.