Even before James Paxton signed with the Dodgers in the offseason, it seemed clear that he was nearing the end of an 11-year career in the majors.
He's dealt with injuries for the majority of his career, but things took a downward turn in 2020 when he underwent a spinal surgery and sat out for the shortened season. The Mariners, the team that drafted him, took a chance on him in 2021, but he could only give them 1 1/3 innings of work before he underwent Tommy John surgery and was shelved for the rest of that campaign.
During his first stint with the Red Sox in 2022, injuries continued to plague Paxton. He started the year on the injured list, still recovering from Tommy John, then sustained a lat tear that kept him off the mound another year. He exercised the player option the Red Sox (foolishly) built into his contract, but his 2023 season still ended prematurely with knee inflammation.
It was sort of a miracle that he managed to stay as healthy for the Dodgers as long he did. Maybe the performance-based incentives in his contract were magically keeping him together in LA — almost as soon as he was traded back to Boston ahead of the deadline, he promptly fell apart again, going onto the 60-day IL with a calf tear.
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James Paxton announces his retirement after another season-ending Red Sox IL stint
On Wednesday, Paxton announced on the Baseball Isn't Boring podcast that, while he still hopes the Red Sox will make it into October and he'll be able to return for some postseason innings, he intends to retire at the end of the season.
Paxton lasted all of three starts and 11 innings with the Red Sox in his return to Boston. He gave up five earned runs for a 4.09 ERA before he collapsed coming off the mound during his third start. It didn't look good then, and after it was diagnosed as a partial tear of his calf, it looked clear that his season was over.
His hopes that the Red Sox will be able to get back to the postseason are becoming dimmer through these last few weeks. They're four games out of the Wild Card, tied with the Mariners, and one game behind the Tigers, and they have by far the worst run differential of any of those contending teams. The Sox have lost 12 of their last 21 games and still have a difficult schedule ahead of them, so things aren't looking good.
Although this latter third of Paxton's career has been far from ideal, he'll always have those two complete games for the Mariners in 2018. We only wish he could've kept it together a little longer for Boston.