PITCHING STAFF FACES MAJOR VOID With Alcantara out for season, Marlins are wary of overusing others
JUPITER
Mel Stottlemyre Jr., entering his sixth year as the Marlins’ pitching coach, always embraces a challenge. He lives to find ways to get the best out of his pitchers and, more often than not, he succeeds.
Stottlemyre knows he will have his share of challenges this season.
A rotation without its ace. Players having to build on the expectations that come after having career years. Monitoring players coming back from injury.
For nearly 30 minutes Sunday after the Marlins finished a spring training workout, Stottlemyre discussed the team’s pitching heading into the 2024 season.
Here are some of the highlights.
“Other great cast members” have to step up: Stottlemyre stated the obvious when he said ace Sandy Alcantara not pitching in 2024 “hurts.” The same goes for the fact that Alcantara not being in the rotation “opens up and presents opportunity for other people personally and the staff to step up collectively as a group.”
“We’ve got other great cast members,” Stottlemyre said.
The rotation will be built around the trio of Jesus Luzardo,
Eury Perez and Braxton Garrett. Trevor Rogers and Edward Cabrera most likely have the inside track to round out the rotation, but Miami is thinking beyond just its top five starters when it comes to filling Alcantara’s void.
Another factor that needs to be considered: innings monitoring.
Luzardo, Perez and Garrett are all coming off career-highs in innings pitched last season, so the Marlins need to see how they respond in 2024. Rogers threw only 18 innings last year before being sidelined for the season. Cabrera didn’t hit 100 innings in the big leagues and was demoted to Triple A for a
essentially the same team. The Miami Heat is doing the same, and scrambling to be a low playoff seed.
“Running it back,” in sports parlance, is meant to present confidence in the product but instead — certainly in the Marlins’ case — means the usual unwillingness to spend big to either sign coveted free agents or to keep your own top guys.
Therefore, the Marlins watched their own top slugger, Jorge Soler, leave for San Francisco and take his 36 home runs with him. It’s because the Giants offered a three-year, $42 million deal, while the perpetually penurious Fish balked at bestowing more than a one-year deal.
With ace and 2022 Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara already lost for the ’24 season recovering from Tommy John surgery, it means the Marlins will try to run it back with the same team except likely worse, because it will be minus both its best pitcher and best power hitter.
The Marlins have a long history of owners who don’t spend enough, Wayne Huizenga to Jeffrey Loria and now Bruce Sherman.
The Marlins also have a long history of low-tier home attendance.
Hmm. Not real tough to connect the dots when there are so few dots.
You spend for talent because talent wins. When you don’t spend enough you don’t win enough and the crowds stay home. Especially in this crowded sports market now, where even the opening of spring training gets swallowed by the buzz of Lionel Messi’s first full season with
Inter Miami, which opens Wednesday night.
The Marlins’ only notable offseason addition was hiring Tampa Bay Rays general manager Peter Bendix to be president of baseball operations. It’s why GM Kim Ng left after guiding the team to a rare playoff berth despite Sherman’s frugal spending — because she knew an incoming president would usurp her power.
Bendix spent the offseason hiring a frontoffice staff, building an infrastructure. That they chose him is no shock, since Tampa Bay is the rare team that manages to win without huge spending — Sherman’s Holy Grail. Bendix wants to improve the team’s scouting and player development and rebuild the now-barren farm system, whose only top-100 prospect (at No. 57) is a 19-year-old righty pitcher named Noble Meyer, who might be ready for a call-up around, say, 2026.
Infrastructure retooling is a thing that might evolve to show dividends in a few years. For now, in 2024, the Marlins need talent in uniforms , not in suits. That is especially and critically so in the difficult NL East, where the Atlanta Braves look like the best team in
MLB, the Philadelphia Phillies are really good, and the Marlins might be fighting just to catch the New York Mets for third best.
“You get what you pay for” is one of life’s undeniables. So:
The Mets’ 40-man 2024 payroll is second in MLB at $283.8 million, the Phillies are fourth at $237.2 and the Braves are sixth at $221.3. The 30-team average is $147.2. The Marlins’ spending ranks 28th at $81.5 million, ahead of only Pittsburgh and Oakland.
The Marlins want to win by being smarter than everybody else. Guess what? Teams that win consistently usually are smart and spend big. You are allowed to do both. Encouraged to, even!
I’m catching myself. Am I being too heavy on the gloom at a time in baseball when hope is supposed to spring eternal? Add a bit of balance then:
This is an 84-win team with an upside secondyear manager in Skip Schumaker. Leadoff hitter Luis Arraez was a great addition who won the NL batting crown at .354 last season. No. 3 starter Eury Perez, 20, could be a future ace.
There is a path to a playoff repeat if all or most of the following happens:
If Jesus Luzardo handles the No. 1 starter role and plays like an ace while Alcantara recovers and Perez develops.
“Going into the season without your guy [Alcantara], that hurts,” says pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. “But it presents opportunity for other people personally and the staff to step up collectively. I promise you, nobody’s happy about it ... but they need to fill that void.”
If 2-3 hitters and corner infielders Jake Burger and Josh Bell play for a full season like they did in their 53 games each last year. Both figure as 20-25 homer guys.
If Jazz Chisholm Jr., center fielder and likely cleanup hitter, finally has a full, healthy season — all of the hype finally blossoming into production.
If Bryan De la Cruz and Jesus Sanchez build on promising ’23 seasons, if Jon Berti proves they didn’t need a better shortstop, if Nick Fortes shows he’s a startingcaliber catcher and if Avisail Garcia does anything at all for the love of God.
“Competition brings out the best in everybody,” says Schumaker. “Some guys run to it. Some guys run from it.”
If enough guys run to it, if enough of the above variables fall right, the Marlins will have a shot to chase the playoffs again.
That would be even despite the absence of Alcantara, despite the loss of Soler, and mostly despite an owner who says he always expects the team to win even though he doesn’t spend commensurate with giving it a real chance.