The Kuiper belt<\/a> is a massive disk of icy objects that\u2019s 20 astronomical units (AUs, the distance between the sun and the earth) wide – for context, that\u2019s the same as the distance from the sun to Uranus. It lies beyond Neptune\u2019s orbit, circumscribing the rest of the solar system. It had been theorized to exist since the 1940\u2019s, but remained hypothesis only until 1992, when a pair of researchers discovered the first object beyond Pluto, a relatively small object that was later named Albion. Between 1992 and 2018, over 2000 distinct hunks of frozen rock were identified,<\/a> and it\u2019s likely that there\u2019s at least a thousand times more objects that are large enough to be structurally stable (100 km in diameter, more or less), but dark or small enough that they\u2019ve eluded detection.<\/p>\n The Kuiper belt is a lonely, cold place. A massive, silent frontier populated by objects not close enough to the sun to feel its warmth but still thralled into orbit by its mass. It\u2019s the boundary between local space and the beyond – between what we know and what we don\u2019t. As a child and as an adult, it\u2019s this liminality, the in-betweenness, that captivates me. I love learning about these lonely little frozen rocks, caught between worlds, and I can\u2019t help but find myself emotionally attached to them.<\/p>\n I feel the same type of small heartache for players like Domingo Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n That\u2019s my little Kuiper belt object Icon Sportswire via Getty Images<\/p>\n John wrote<\/a> about Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s journey to Seattle after the Mariners claimed him off the waiver wire last August. He\u2019s lived the unfortunate reality of being at the butt-end of the 40-man roster – a few mediocre months, or even just roster constraints for the big-league club, and you find yourself DFA\u2019d and waiting to see who calls.<\/p>\n His 2024 season was the culmination of an incrementally-rising star for him that earned a mention by Fangraphs as a prospect to watch (though still falling outside the top 40 list) for Atlanta. He saw his best traits, his whiffs and his strikeouts, reach new heights, and showed real improvement in his command, one of his weaker spots through his professional career.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the fate of relievers, though, to eternally live in small-sample lands. They tend to see higher highs and lower lows. Gonz\u00e1lez lived this in 2025.<\/p>\n Even in his best years, the platoon struggles have been brutal for him: in 2024 and 2025, he had a OPS split of .297 – from a .520 against RHH to .817 against LHH. That\u2019s essentially the difference between pitching against 2025 Josh Naylor or Lamonte Wade Jr. If you\u2019re unfamiliar with Wade Jr, well, it might be because he had about a .520 OPS last year and had a 52 wRC+ last season.<\/p>\n He introduced a new pitch, a splitter, to try and become viable against lefties. Unfortunately, the splitter did not pan out. He threw about 45 of them, never developing a consistent movement profile and garnering mediocre results.<\/p>\n zoinks Prospect Savant<\/p>\n So, when Atlanta found themselves in need of a pitcher capable of spot-starting, Gonz\u00e1lez found himself as the 40th man on a 40-man roster, and out of a job.<\/p>\n Moving to Tacoma in August, Gonz\u00e1lez struggled even more. Turns out getting cut for nothing and moving across the country doesn\u2019t necessarily help the ole\u2019 mental game. By season-end, Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019 had seen a major drop-off in almost every meaningful statistic compared to 2024. His FIP rose from 2.75 to 4.73, his K% fell from 36.3% to 20%. His spin-rate on the fastball and slider fell by about 150 RPMs. Nothing went his way.<\/p>\n Gonz\u00e1lez is almost certainly starting the season in Triple-A. His path to finding big-league playing time is difficult to make out, likely blocked by about three or four fellow Pilers who are higher on the depth chart than him. Nothing in his profile particularly screams Contraptability, but that is the most realistic way for him to find a spot in Seattle\u2019s bullpen – hope that the pitching machine can find some freak pitch for him to throw. However, being a waiver wire pickup makes his acquisition truly feel like a depth add and less like a project.<\/p>\n While he does have all of his minor-league options left and his 2024 numbers do inspire some optimism, that hope is admittedly dim as we enter 2026.<\/p>\n Dark matter is the theorized something that astrophysicists say serves as the \u201cgravitational scaffolding\u201d<\/a> for the universe – we can\u2019t see this material, but its existence seems prerequisite for the universe to exist and behave the way it does. Invisible but essential, players like Gonz\u00e1lez and their fungibility serve the same purpose for MLB. MLB as we know it is held together almost entirely by the career minor leaguers. The scaffolding that provides developmental opportunities for the 10% of minor leaguers who play even a single game in MLB is the other 90%. The dirt-cheap labor of the 90% subsidizes the pocketbooks of the never-enough owners. And without that 90% playing games in front of families in smaller cities and towns across the country, baseball\u2019s tenuous grasp on national pastime-hood would grow weaker. So yes, it doesn\u2019t seem likely that Gonz\u00e1lez will get the opportunity to impact the big league club before finding a new home. But it doesn\u2019t mean that he, and the hundreds of players just like him, aren\u2019t massively important to MLB.<\/p>\n And yeah, I acknowledge that the space metaphors have become a little mixed here. Are Gonz\u00e1lez and players like him dark matter or Kuiper belt objects? Should I have re-written this to fit just one theme or the other? Does this all feel a little bit forced? Yes, yes, probably and yes. Regardless, I know that I feel the same way about Gonz\u00e1lez as I do 486958 Arrokoth<\/a>, a small, interesting Kuiper belt object that was the recipient of a New Horizons flyby in 2019. I\u2019m drawn to them, almost unwillingly compelled to obsess over their minutia, and emotionally impacted by their circumstances. They both live on the outside looking in. Held in orbit by a tantalizing promise. Easily forgotten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since I was a young child, I\u2019ve had a deep pre-occupation with outer space, particularly the solar system.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2392],"tags":[66354,5,620,4,619,65,38419,3235],"class_list":{"0":"post-558819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-mariners","8":"tag-40-in-40","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-mariners","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-seattle","13":"tag-seattle-mariners","14":"tag-seattle-mariners-previews","15":"tag-seattlemariners"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116026770675435789","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"That\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/gettyimages-2202669635.jpg\"\/)
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