The Marlins made it official on Sunday, designating John King for assignment to open a roster spot as right-hander Jack Ralston came up from Triple-A Jacksonville. It's the kind of move that barely registers on a scoreboard but says a lot about where Miami's bullpen priorities sit with a little over a month left in the season.
King signed with Miami back in February on a one-year, $1.5 million deal, a low-cost flier on a ground-ball lefty who'd bounced from the Rangers to the Cardinals over parts of six big league seasons. He came to Texas originally, got flipped to St. Louis in the 2023 deadline deal that sent Jordan Montgomery the other way, and carried a career 3.80 ERA into free agency after the Cardinals non-tendered him last November.
For most of this season the bet looked fine. King sat at a respectable 3.99 ERA across 49.2 innings for Miami, doing the quiet-lefty-specialist thing teams pay for. Then August happened. Over his last 7 appearances he got torched for a 13.50 ERA in just 6.2 innings, and the underlying numbers explain why — his sinker lost roughly 2.6 mph off its usual velocity, and his earlier results had leaned on batted-ball luck that finally ran out.
That's the real story here: not a bad month, but a decline in stuff that made the ERA collapse look inevitable in hindsight. Miami still owes King around $280,700 of his guarantee for the rest of the year regardless of what happens next, so this isn't really about saving money — it's about roster fit. Ralston, for what it's worth, got optioned right back to Jacksonville after making his debut, so the Marlins are clearly still shuffling arms rather than settling on a set bullpen.
King now has a week to be claimed off waivers, traded, or outrighted, and given the diminished velocity, there's no guarantee another club rushes to grab him. For a journeyman who's carved out a real career as a steady middle-innings lefty, this is the kind of DFA that either becomes a footnote on the next stop or the beginning of the end — and August's numbers make it hard to bet on the former.