Since I was a young child, I’ve had a deep pre-occupation with outer space, particularly the solar system. While the rest of the universe is obviously deeply fascinating, the solar system is so much more observable. We get to know stuff about it. That rocks.
In particular, I’ve always been drawn to trans-Neptunian space – the region between Neptune’s orbit and the outer edge of the Sun’s gravitational and magnetic influence (the heliopause). When I was six, I named my favorite stuffed animal Kuiper to honor the Kuiper belt, the second real obsession of my life (following my intense Barney the Friendly Dinosaur phase).
The Kuiper belt is a massive disk of icy objects that’s 20 astronomical units (AUs, the distance between the sun and the earth) wide – for context, that’s the same as the distance from the sun to Uranus. It lies beyond Neptune’s orbit, circumscribing the rest of the solar system. It had been theorized to exist since the 1940’s, 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, and it’s likely that there’s 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’ve eluded detection.
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’s the boundary between local space and the beyond – between what we know and what we don’t. As a child and as an adult, it’s this liminality, the in-betweenness, that captivates me. I love learning about these lonely little frozen rocks, caught between worlds, and I can’t help but find myself emotionally attached to them.
I feel the same type of small heartache for players like Domingo González.
John wrote about González’s journey to Seattle after the Mariners claimed him off the waiver wire last August. He’s 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’d and waiting to see who calls.
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.
It’s the fate of relievers, though, to eternally live in small-sample lands. They tend to see higher highs and lower lows. González lived this in 2025.
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’s essentially the difference between pitching against 2025 Josh Naylor or Lamonte Wade Jr. If you’re unfamiliar with Wade Jr, well, it might be because he had about a .520 OPS last year and had a 52 wRC+ last season.
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.
So, when Atlanta found themselves in need of a pitcher capable of spot-starting, González found himself as the 40th man on a 40-man roster, and out of a job.
Moving to Tacoma in August, González struggled even more. Turns out getting cut for nothing and moving across the country doesn’t necessarily help the ole’ mental game. By season-end, González’ 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.
González 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’s 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.
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.
Dark matter is the theorized something that astrophysicists say serves as the “gravitational scaffolding” for the universe – we can’t see this material, but its existence seems prerequisite for the universe to exist and behave the way it does. Invisible but essential, players like González 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’s tenuous grasp on national pastime-hood would grow weaker. So yes, it doesn’t seem likely that González will get the opportunity to impact the big league club before finding a new home. But it doesn’t mean that he, and the hundreds of players just like him, aren’t massively important to MLB.
And yeah, I acknowledge that the space metaphors have become a little mixed here. Are González 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 González as I do 486958 Arrokoth, a small, interesting Kuiper belt object that was the recipient of a New Horizons flyby in 2019. I’m 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.
