Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Will Sixto be ready for Opening Day?
JUPITER — Sixto Sanchez is still waiting to make his Grapefruit League debut after a delayed start to spring training and a recent false positive test for COVID-19, and the Miami Marlins have yet to set any firm timeline for when he could take the mound in real game action.
The starting pitcher did, however, take a significant step toward a debut Sunday.
“Sixto threw a ‘pen yesterday,” manager Don Mattingly said, “a really good ‘pen.”
The bullpen session sets Sanchez up to face live hitting soon. Mattingly said the next steps for the highly touted rookie will be to see how he responds after the bullpen session and then throw a live bullpen in the coming days.
“Tentatively,” Mattingly said, “the next step would be a live and then, tentatively obviously, going from there.”
With no firm timeline in place right now, it’s not yet clear whether the right-handed pitcher will be ready for Opening Day next month.
There’s no set number of starts Mattingly is targeting for Sanchez ahead Miami’s opener on the first day of April. Instead, Sanchez’s readiness will be determined by whether he is fully built up to give the Marlins a full effort in his first start of the regular season.
Miami wants to get Sanchez a five-inning start — or a 75- or 80-pitch outing — in the spring to have him ready for the regular season. If he isn’t fully built up in time, Sanchez could remain in Jupiter to build up fully and join the Marlins a bit later in April.
Miami won’t rush Sanchez to have him ready for the first week of the season, though. After Sanchez’s rocky start to the spring, the Marlins want to let him work with his own timeline. Miami has always taken this approach with Sanchez, anyway.
“With Six, we’ve kind of always rode that wave of making sure he’s solid and then moving to the next step,” Mattingly said. “We don’t want to just schedule all the way out and push him to our schedule. We want to make sure the schedule’s fitting him and where he’s at.”
Sanchez’s spring began with a delay. A visa issue held up the 22-year-old pitcher as he returned to Florida from the Dominican Republic, and he didn’t arrive in Palm Beach County until five days after pitchers and catchers began workouts. He threw two bullpen sessions the last two weeks before he returned a false positive COVID test result as part of MLB’s regular virus screening process. He missed a few days of camp before rejoining the team Saturday and Mattingly said the hiccup, “did set his program back just a little bit.”
Sanchez, who’s among the preseason favorites for an MLB Rookie of the Year Award this year, made his Major League debut last season and made nine starts, including two in the MLB postseason. He posted a 3.64 ERA with 41 strikes and 16 walks in 47 innings.
Marte, Dickerson and leadoff spot
Miami’s lineup against the St. Louis Cardinals on Monday was a preview of what the Marlins may trot out when the season begins in April — at least when they face left-handed pitchers.
Outfielder Starling Marte was in the lead-off spot for Miami with left-handed starting pitcher Kwang-hyun Kim on the mound for the Cardinals at Roger Dean Stadium and Mattingly dropped outfielder Corey Dickerson down to the No. 2 spot in the order.
Until Monday, Dickerson exclusively hit in the leadoff spot when Miami used its likely regular starting lineup. Mattingly said he likes the idea of Marte as the leadoff hitter against lefties, “and maybe either way.” Part of his calculus will involve how he distributes his left-handed hitters throughout the lineup.
“Depending on who we hit down in the order, you want to make sure that — if you’re going to bring a lefty against Corey — there’s righties on both sides of that,” Mattingly said, “so you kind of want to not encourage the lefty and not bunch those guys.”
There’s a good chance Miami will only have two lefties in its regular lineup — Dickerson and either Isan Diaz or Jazz Chisholm, whichever starts and second base — but Mattingly wants to keep his options open, which means giving Dickerson some time in the No. 2 spot.
“I want to just kind of mess around with that spot for Corey in the two and Star’s led off a lot of his career,” he said, “so I’m going to look at that a little bit.”