Mariners to place Bryce Miller on IL

The Mariners are placing righty Bryce Miller back on the 15-day injured list, reports Tim Booth of the Seattle Times. Fellow right-hander Logan Evans will be summoned back from Triple-A Tacoma to make tonight’s start against the D-backs in his place.

Miller was out for most of May due to inflammation in his right elbow. The Mariners hoped a cortisone injection would calm down the pain and allow Miller to reclaim his spot in the rotation, but that clearly didn’t pan out. The 26-year-old Miller made two starts between IL stints and was rocked for eight runs on 11 hits and a pair of walks with only four strikeouts in nine innings. Between that pair of dismal outings and a another pair of clunkers that preceded his original IL stint, Miller has yielded 19 runs over his past 18 frames.

In some respects, Miller has seemed off all season. He posted a solid 3.52 ERA and 24% strikeout rate in his first six starts of the season but did so while walking nearly 15% of his opponents. That’s a huge departure from Miller’s excellent 5.7% walk rate in 2023-24, the first two seasons of his big league career. His average fastball has also dipped this year, falling from 95.2 mph in 2024 to 94.5 mph in 2025. He’s also allowing hard contact and line drives at the highest rates of his career.

From 2023-24, Miller posted a 3.52 ERA, 23.4% strikeout rate and 5.7% walk rate in 311 2/3 innings, cementing himself among Seattle’s long-term rotation plans in the process. Prior to this year, he’d been as durable as one can hope from a starter in today’s game. Miller skipped a couple starts in 2023 due to a series of blisters on his pitching hand, but this pair of IL placements due to elbow inflammation are the first two IL stints for actual arm injuries in either the big leagues or the minors. He started 31 games in 2024, 29 in 2023 (25 in MLB, four in Triple-A) and 26 in 2022.

There’s no immediate timetable on Miller’s absence. Given the rocky results and the inefficacy of the most recent cortisone injection, it seems fair to expect he could be sidelined for longer than the 19 days he missed on his last IL stint. The team will presumably have more information in the near future — if not when the IL placement is formalized today then in the days ahead.

In the meantime, the 24-year-old Evans will get another look in the big leagues. It’s well earned. A 12th-round senior sign out of Pittsburgh who commanded just a $100K draft bonus in 2023, Evans has quickly proven to be one of the more notable late-round steals in recent memory. He skyrocketed through the Mariners’ system last year and pitched so well that there was talk of a potential call to the big leagues just a year after he was drafted.

That didn’t come to pass, but Evans entered the year considered among the top 10 prospects in an absolutely stacked Mariners farm system and received his first call to the big leagues in late April. He’s since made six starts in the majors and posted a 2.83 ERA in 35 innings. His 17.4% strikeout rate is well below average, but his 6.9% walk rate is strong and his deep six-pitch arsenal gives opposing hitters a variety of average or slightly better offerings to keep in mind while facing him. Both Baseball America and MLB.com tout him as a high-probability fourth starter and note that his 6’4″ frame is that of a prototypical innings eater.

Evans will join Bryan Woo, Luis Castillo, George Kirby and Emerson Hancock in the Seattle rotation for the time being. Woo and Castillo have both been excellent this season. Kirby missed the first eight weeks of the year with shoulder inflammation and stumbled out of the gate but has looked sensational over his past two starts, logging a flat 3.00 ERA with a 17-to-1 K/BB ratio in 12 innings. Hancock has made nine very good starts (combined 3.26 ERA in 49 2/3 innings) and two terrible starts (combined 13 runs in 5 2/3 innings), balancing out to a lackluster 5.04 ERA.

Logan Gilbert, arguably the Mariners’ top starter, has been on the shelf since late April due to a flexor strain but is expected back soon. He’s made two rehab appearances already and is scheduled to make a third — and, per Booth, perhaps final — rehab start for Tacoma tonight.