Young pitchers make most of chances amid run of injuries
Nine of the Marlins’ past 11 games have been played without Sandy Alcantara, Trevor Rogers or Pablo Lopez. Rookies Zach Thompson, Braxton Garrett and Nick Neidert have taken advantage.
When the Marlins placed Trevor Rogers on the 10-day injured list Saturday after the All-Star rookie dealt with a bout of lower back muscle spasms, manager Don Mattingly’s options for his starting pitching rotation immediately became slim.
Within a span of eight days, each of the team’s top three starting pitchers had been removed from the active roster. Pablo Lopez was first on July 17, going on the IL with a right rotator cuff strain before his scheduled first start after the All-Star break. Sandy Alcantara followed, being placed on the bereavement list on July 20 — the day before he was scheduled to make his 21st start of the season. And then Rogers, the frontrunner for NL Rookie of the Year, landed on the IL for the first time in his big-league career.
Add in the previous injuries to Elieser Hernandez (on the 60day IL for the second time this year) and Sixto Sanchez (seasonending shoulder surgery before throwing a pitch in a live game), and the Marlins for the first time this year were without any of their projected Opening Day starting pitchers.
Nine of Miami’s 11 starts since returning from the break have been made by players not named Alcantara, Rogers or Lopez. Four of those games have been bullpen days. The other five starts have been made by rookies, two apiece by Zach Thompson and Braxton Garrett and one by Nick Neidert.
While the Marlins are hopeful to have a full-strength rotation at some point as this season heads into the final two months — Alcantara is back on the mound
Tuesday when the Marlins face the Baltimore Orioles to open a two-game road series — the opportunity for their top pitching prospects to get regular reps is a silver lining.
Garrett and Neidert, for example, have bounced between the big leagues and Triple A Jacksonville all season, joining the major-league club when the team needs a pitcher to make a spot start or be an emergency option out of the bullpen. Results in
terms of stats have been mixed. The importance is the reps, the chance for the breakthrough moment and the chance for the organization to evaluate the players at the highest level.
“Just looking for them to continue to grow,” Mattingly said, “and just knowing that they’re kind of learning on the fly and learning in the big leagues.
“Sometimes those lessons are good. Sometimes, they’re not near as much fun.”
The results? Overall, they have been pretty good.
Thompson has a 3.00 ERA over nine innings in his two starts (three earned runs allowed in nine innings) with five strikeouts against threewalks while allowing eight hits.
Garrett has a 3.18 ERA in his two starts (four earned runs allowed in 11 innings) and had the best start of his young MLB career on Saturday when he recorded 10 strikeouts over seven innings against the San Diego Padres. Neidert threw five innings of onerun ball in his start against the Washington Nationals on July 21.
And Miami went 2-2 in those four bullpen games, holding opponents to three runs or fewer in three of them — the fourth was an 18-1 drubbing by the Nationals.
The Marlins’ pitching staff still ranked fifth in MLB with a collective 3.53 ERA entering Monday and was in the top 10 in the league in home runs allowed (second, 87), walks and hits per inning pitched (ninth, 1.21), batting average against (10th, .230) and walks allowed per nine innings (ninth, 3.17).
“Consistency is great,” said Thompson, who has made seven big-league starts filling out one of the back-end rotation spots. “The more I can be out there, the more of a routine I can get into and the more I can kind of figure out what things work for me and what things don’t. ... I can start to start looking back on my data that I’ve had of every previous start and start forming a routine.
“It just brings a lot of confidence. The more you’re out here, the more you can keep throwing and keep on a consistent basis, it really just helps out a lot.”