Mariners recall RHP Collin Snider, place LHP Gabe Speier on 15-day IL
Some not-so-good news in advance of Saturday’s tilt against the Angels
The Mariners have begun their Saturday with some disappointing news: LHP Gabe Speier is apparently dealing with a rotator cuff injury to his throwing shoulder. He has been placed on the 15-day injured list retroactive to May 30, when he last appeared. Nothing was obviously wrong with Speier in that outing — he faced his usual three batters, ending his outing with a strikeout of Yordan Álvarez before being pulled with a righty coming up.
.@Mariners roster moves:
— Mariners PR (@MarinersPR) June 1, 2024
Collin Snider, RHP, recalled from Triple-A Tacoma.
Gabe Speier, LHP, placed on 15-day Injured List (retroactive to May 30, left rotator cuff strain).
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Manager Scott Servais will be holding his usual pregame presser later today, and hopefully he can shed some light on whether Speier has been having a hard time bouncing back, or if something more acute happened in the interim. He has seemed to be struggling uncharacteristically this year, so perhaps this has been a more chronic injury that the team is finally pulling the plug on.
Speier will be replaced in the bullpen by righty Collin Snider, leaving Tayler Saucedo and Kirby Snead as the team’s only lefty pitchers on the roster. If you don’t remember him, Snider was claimed off waivers from the Diamondbacks over the offseason. He made the team out of Spring Training before being hit in the knee with a line drive on April 7, which sent him to the IL. He went to Tacoma after recovering, and has pitched quite well over the last month, putting up 11.48 K/9.
UPDATE, 1:52 PM PT
Servais said in his pre-game press conference that this has not been an ongoing injury that Speier has been dealing with. “He’s going to be down a couple of weeks at least,” Servais continued. “He grabbed me before the game yesterday [sic] and said he wasn’t feeling great, so we talked with the trainers and that’s why we want to get pictures of it.”
It sounds like the team did, in fact, get an MRI done, which demonstrated inflammation in the rotator cuff. “Everybody gets sore here and there, but this one, this one just crept up here yesterday,” Servais said. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Speier’s absence could extend beyond the mandatory 15 days.