A decade after being traded, Chris Paddack ready for ‘full-circle’ Marlins moment
Chris Paddack never thought he would see the day. It has been nearly a decade since the Miami Marlins, the team that drafted him in the eighth round of the 2015 MLB Draft, traded him to the San Diego Padres for Fernando Rodney in 2016 when he was still a rising prospect in their system.
Paddack has since carved out a seven-year MLB career as a starting right-handed pitcher with stops in San Diego, Minnesota and Detroit along the way.
Now, he’s back where it all started after signing a one-year, $4 million deal with the Marlins that became official Thursday night.
Now, he’s ready to make an impact for the team who gave him a chance to live out his dream — even if he has been living it out elsewhere all this time.
“It is a full- circle moment for me. Man, it’s really cool,” Paddack said Friday. “On my drive up from Texas, I just was like, ‘Man, this is a cool opportunity — the team that gave me that first chance as a young kid. The fact that I get to put a Marlins jersey on and just show the city of Miami who I once was back in 2015, why they drafted me, is a pretty surreal moment.”
Paddack’s signing comes after an offseason in which Miami dealt two of its starting pitchers — Edward Cabrera and Ryan Weathers — in order to add a handful of top hitting prospects, including potential Opening Day right fielder Owen Caissie.
“You can never have too much pitching,” Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix said. “And I still feel really good about our depth. We weren’t looking to bring in just anybody. We think Chris is somebody that we can really help get a lot better.”
Paddack, who turned 30 last month, has a career 32-36 record and 4.64 ERA over 118 career appearances (110 starts), with 529 strikeouts against 126 walks over 581 2/3 innings.
But he’s coming off a 2025 season in which his ERA ballooned to 5.35 over a career-high 158 innings split between the Twins and Tigers.
Paddack is great at limiting walks (just 5.5% in 2025) and getting hitters to swing at pitches outside the strike zone (they chased on 31.7% of those pitches he threw last season and 30.4% for his career), but he struggled to miss bats last season. Opponents swung and missed at just 20.7% of his pitches last season, by far the lowest rate of his career.
“Sometimes I overly compete in the zone,” Paddack said, “and it costs me some base hits with two strikes. Or with runners on second and third, I’m not able to slow the game down and get out of that jam, and the next thing I know, it’s a crooked number that happens very fast.”
One area where Paddack believes the Marlins can help him: The fact that the team is calling pitches from the dugout. Miami experimented with that at the MLB level late last season after implementing it throughout the minor leagues.
For Paddack, who throws six different pitches (four-seam fastball, changeup, curveball, slider, cutter and sinker), the hope is he will be able to pitch more freely this way.
“Sometimes we overthink out there,” Paddack said. “Sometimes, we give the hitters too much credit. You know, this game is very hard, and sometimes we overcomplicate things. ...
Added Marlins manager Clayton McCullough: “We think we can really help Chris. We think we can get a lot of his arsenal back to into a place where he can perform more like he’s capable of than maybe how last season went. He’s a premium strike-thrower. He certainly has started a lot of games in the major leagues. He gives us another stable arm we believe that can fit right into our rotation and also with we believe the upside to help him perform very well in ‘26.”
And that Marlins rotation is looking much deeper now following Paddack’s signing.
The Marlins have a dozen players in camp they believe can realistically help the team as starting pitchers to begin the season.
The group is led by Sandy Alcantara, who the Marlins on Friday named as their Opening Day starter, and Eury Perez. Beyond those two and Paddack, the Marlins’ rotation contenders include Max Meyer, Braxton Garrett, Janson Junk, Adam Mazur, Ryan Gusto, Robby Snelling, Thomas White, Bradley Blalock and Dax Fulton for the final two spots — and potentially a long relief/swingman role in the bullpen.
“It’s a good thing to have a long list of guys that are certainly very capable,” McCullough said. “Throughout this camp, there will be chances to go out there and pitch and compete with 30-some-odd spring training games. The dust will settle at the end of camp, knowing that we’re going to need a lot of guys to be able to come up and take down starts for us.”
.JPG)