The Padres have signed left-hander Ryan Carpenter to a minor league deal, per Evan Woodbery of MLive. The southpaw will presumably receive an invitation to Spring Training and compete for a roster spot.
Carpenter, 33, has a small amount of major league experience, having pitched for the Tigers in 2018 and 2019. He made 15 appearances, including 14 starts, logging 63 innings over those two seasons. Unfortunately, he allowed 8.57 earned runs per nine innings in that small sample and hasn’t been back to the big leagues since.
The lefty signed with the Rakuten Monkeys of the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan for 2020 and had a solid season for them. He tossed 157 1/3 innings over 26 appearances with an ERA of 4.00. That led to a deal with the Hanwha Eagles of the Korea Baseball Organization, which is generally considered to be a stronger league than the CPBL. He tossed 170 frames for the Eagles in 2021 with an ERA of 3.97.
Carpenter returned to the Eagles for 2022 but wasn’t able to make much impact, making just four appearances. He was released a couple of months into that season with reports of elbow soreness. Public details on what followed from there are sparse but he didn’t pitch anywhere in 2023. It’s possible that he required some sort of elbow procedure and spent the year rehabbing, though that is entirely speculative.
The Padres have plenty of rotation uncertainty at the moment and questions around their budget as well. Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish give the club a strong duo at the top of their starting staff but Seth Lugo declined his player option and is now a free agent. Michael Wacha and Nick Martinez have complicated contract options but could follow Lugo out the door. Blake Snell will surely receive and turn down a qualifying offer and head to the open market himself, alongside midseason pickup Rich Hill.
The club will surely be looking to bolster the rotation but financial issues could perhaps limit how aggressive they are in signing free agents to accomplish that task. Carpenter figures to compete with internal options like Jay Groome, Pedro Avila, Matt Waldron and Adrián Morejón for a spot on the depth chart.
