Tai Peete adds exclamation point to rewrite of Mariners' Brendan Donovan trade

The Seattle Mariners acquired Brendan Donovan with two years to get the most out of him, and one has already gone to waste. The hope in a situation like this is that the other end of the trade doesn't haunt you, and there's the bad news: Tai Peete has been awesome in the St. Louis Cardinals system.

In his latest feat on Sunday, Peete went 5-for-5 with a home run for the Double-A Springfield Cardinals in the Texas League finals. It's a fitting cap for a season marked by huge games. He also hit for the cycle in April and had three multi-homer games in the span of a few weeks in July and August.

Peete has only played in 66 games because of a concussion, which is unfortunately where there's common ground between him and Donovan this year. Yet the 21-year-old outfielder's breakout ultimately goes beyond a handful of headline-worthy games. He finished a .908 OPS and 13 home runs, both of which are career highs.

MLB Pipeline still only has Peete ranked as the No. 17 prospect in St. Louis' system. That's five spots below Jurrangelo Cijntje, the Cardinals' other main get in the Donovan trade. He had a rough year in his own right, posting a 4.87 ERA over 133.0 innings. In the process, his switch-pitching was basically reduced to a parlor trick.

Yet between Peete and Cijntje, Peete is clearly coming out of 2026 with more helium. The book on him is that he's a terrific athlete with an iffy hit tool, but it's not just his results that give hope. His strikeout rate dropped after he moved from High-A to Double-A, a very good sign indeed.

The Mariners are left to hope that 2027 will be better for Brendan Donovan

When we graded the Donovan trade in February, we basically skipped over Peete by writing him off as a former first-rounder whose stock had gone bad. And that was just part of the reason we had the deal pegged as a win for the Mariners.

It was hard to know then that Donovan was only going to end up playing in 39 of the Mariners' first 156 games, primarily due to lower-half injuries. The Mariners might have, though. As per Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times, Donovan "wasn't completely healthy" when the season started. This was in the wake of offseason surgery for a sports hernia, so we would seem to have another damning piece for the puzzle that is the team's baffling approach to injuries.

Next year will be Donovan's last season before free agency, and it will need to count for the Mariners to get their money's worth. What they saw from him this year (i.e., 127 OPS+) was very good. They're just going to need more of it, especially if he's tasked with filling Randy Arozarena's shoes in left field.

For now, the wind has already shifted direction on the trade that brought Donovan to Seattle. It was "The Brendan Donovan Trade" in February. Now, you already have to wonder if time will prove it to have been "The Tai Peete Trade."

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