Mariners acquire 1B Josh Naylor from the Diamondbacks for two pitchers
LHP Brandyn Garcia and RHP Ashton Izzi are headed back to Arizona in the deal
Today the Mariners kicked off the 2025 trade deadline by acquiring 1B Josh Naylor from the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for LHP Brandyn Garcia, who recently made his big-league debut, and minor-league RHP Ashton Izzi.
While the Mariners traditionally like to act quickly on the market whether at the deadline or in the off-season, this trade deadline has been slow-developing. I had the opportunity to chat casually with Jerry Dipoto this week and he expressed his belief that the first domino to fall in order to set off the action this trade deadline needed to be the Diamondbacks. He didn’t go as far as to say he was rooting for an Astros sweep, but he did seem to be of the opinion that a sweep would push the DBacks onto the sellers side of the divide. That vision came true today as Arizona shipped out first baseman Josh Naylor to Seattle.
Naylor’s offensive profile fits the Mariners well. He’s a peak zone-controller, walking almost as often as he strikes out, and he hits for average as well as for power, even if his homer pace has fallen off sharply this season from his career-high 31 last year. That won’t be helped by a move to Seattle’s less-friendly confines, although as a lefty pull hitter (44%) he’ll be able to take advantage of that shorter wall in right, in Seager-ian style. Even if he’s not hitting homers, Naylor’s on-base abilities make him a good choice to slot in at the tope of the lineup, giving Cal Raleigh a batter shot of coming up with runners on base. Naylor will provide value at a position where the Mariners have been struggling to find it, as first base has been a low-production zone all season, starting with the Rowdy Tellez experiment.
This does lead to the question of what will happen with the now logjam at first base/right field/DH. Luke Raley has been seeing time at first in order to put Dominic Canzone in the outfield, but Raley isn’t a natural first baseman and profiles better in the outfield. Probably, the two are redundant on the team, but both are outhitting Donovan Solano, who has been an albatross on the roster all season. With Jorge Polanco and Mitch Garver in the mix for DH, there’s not enough at-bats to go around. Canzone could be optioned back to Tacoma, but he’s been hitting well, maybe the best out of the bunch over the past few weeks.
Bats, especially corner infield ones, are at a premium this deadline; as Dipoto expressed it to me, “we have a sense that everyone is going to be shopping in the same aisles we’re shopping in.” That is reflected in the price the Mariners paid for two months (or hopefully more) of Naylor’s services: two pieces of young, controllable pitching, one fresh off his MLB debut in Brandyn Garcia and one young, projectable farmhand Ashton Izzi. Garcia is an electric arm whose command issues were on display in his two big-league outings; Arizona, having announced they’re sellers, will have time to give him innings and let him work through his command issues. Izzi is a Mariners pitching development success story, a high school arm drafted in 2022 whose stuff took a big step forward this season with Everett.
If it feels like a lot to give for two months of a rental player, well, it is. It is also reflective of the prices teams will be paying this deadline. There’s every chance that this deal looks like a relative bargain once the trade deadline really starts to sizzle, and it should prepare Mariners fans for what a potential Eugenio Suárez trade could look like: something that would hurt, a lot, for the best available bat currently on the market.