San Diego made its move official this weekend: Randy Vasquez is reinstated from the injured list, and Ron Marinaccio is designated for assignment to clear the spot. It's a small transaction on paper, but it's the kind of roster tweak that says a lot about where the Padres think their bullpen needs to go as the trade deadline stretch heats up.
The move itself, straight from the transaction wire.
Vasquez landed on the IL after getting hit on the ankle by a comebacker against the Dodgers on July 2, and the injury came with a scare — he reportedly felt faint after the impact. He's been a rotation piece for San Diego all year, part of the return from the Juan Soto blockbuster with the Yankees back in December 2023 alongside Michael King, Drew Thorpe and Jhony Brito. He broke camp in the rotation and had made 26 starts in 28 outings this season before the ankle injury, but with the Padres carrying five healthy starters right now, word out of San Diego is Vasquez is ticketed for bullpen work for the time being rather than a straight return to the rotation.
Marinaccio, meanwhile, is the guy paying the price for that logjam. He was lights-out in a small sample for San Diego last year, keeping his ERA under 1.00 in 10.2 innings after coming over, and he'd run sub-4.00 ERAs across three years with the Yankees before that. This season has been a different story — his ERA has ballooned to 4.79 across 47 innings, easily a career-worst mark, and that's not the profile you keep around when a rotation arm needs a bullpen landing spot.
The early returns on the swap are exactly what San Diego wanted to see. In his first outing back, Vasquez threw 3 scoreless innings of relief, an immediate answer for a bullpen that's been searching for length and reliability behind the high-leverage arms.
The follow-up: Vasquez's line in his return from the IL.
Three zeroes is one outing, not a trend, but for a team jockeying for playoff position in a stacked NL West and staring down the deadline, a starter-turned-reliever who can eat innings without giving up runs is exactly the kind of value-add nobody outside the building was counting on. If Vasquez keeps stacking clean outings, the Padres get a de facto multi-inning weapon for free — and Marinaccio's DFA starts to look like an easy call in hindsight.