Sixto’s innings limit. Starters’ next step. Bullpen expectations. Mel Stottlemyre Jr. explains
As he heads into his 10th year as a Major League Baseball pitching coach and third with the Miami Marlins, Mel Stottlemyre Jr. faces a unique challenge in the 2021 season as MLB ramps back up to a full 162-game schedule after playing just 60 regular-season games in a pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
The starting pitchers at his disposal are young and talented. The bullpen is filled with veterans.
And precautions have to be made to make sure injuries are limited and top players are competing at the end of the season.
During the course of a 20-plus minute group interview Tuesday via Zoom, Stottlemyre outlined the Marlins’ plan of attack.
Easing Sixto in
Stottlemyre said Sixto Sanchez, the club’s top prospect and a unanimous top-25 prospect in baseball, will be on an innings limit in 2021.
Sanchez, 22, threw 47 total innings last season (regular season and playoffs) and has faced two setbacks so far this spring — first a delayed arrival due to a visa issue and then a false positive COVID-19 test — that have held him out of Grapefruit League games as the halfway mark of spring training approaches.
“We’re gonna have to put an inning cap on his workload,” Stottlemyre said. “We’ve sat down and we have a plan for that.”
The good news for the Marlins: They don’t necessarily need him to be ready right away.
The Marlins have two off days in the first nine days of the regular season, setting up the possibility to only need four starting pitchers for the first two turns through the rotation.
The plan for starting pitchers
The ultimate goal, Stottlemyre said, is to have all of their starting pitchers available in September.
The puzzle to solve is how to get there.
“You might see some things that we do on a monthly basis where they skip starts and try not to do all of that on the back end,” Stottlemyre said. “The other thing we don’t know is that guys get hurt, maybe they don’t reach their inning totals because they’re not efficient. We have an idea — we think we know — what those numbers are gonna look like at the end. There is some sort of planning going into it.”
So anticipate the Marlins using all of their top starters — Sandy Alcantara, Pablo Lopez, Elieser Hernandez, Trevor Rogers, Nick Neidert, Braxton Garrett, Daniel Castano, Sanchez (once he’s ready), Gio Gonzalez (on a minor-league deal with the team) and potentially Edward Cabrera (who’s recovering from right biceps nerve inflammation) — throughout the season.
Alcantara, Lopez and Gonzalez are the only three pitchers from that group who have thrown more than 100 innings in a given season.
“You have to look at their workload in the past and look at those innings and if they’ve ever gotten to a point where they’ve pitched a bunch of innings,” Stottlemyre said. “With our young guys and their progressions, some of them are still trying to get there.”
One advantage the Marlins do have: They had their pitchers stay on a consistent routine during the four-month hiatus last year before the truncated season began. Every five days, just like in a normal season, they were throwing off a mound.
So while the official innings numbers from 2020 won’t reflect it, Stottlemyre said he feels that puts his pitchers in a better place as some prepare to double or even triple their workload from a year ago.
“We kept our young guys going,” Stottlemyre said. “There really wasn’t a shutdown period. ... We didn’t know what was going to come from the pandemic and how baseball was going to handle that and I didn’t want to take a chance on those guys getting shut down.”
But even with innings expected to be limited for some, Stottlemyre said he anticipates the starting rotation to take another step forward in 2021. Outside of 35-year-old Gonzalez, none of the Marlins primary starting pitcher candidates are older than 26.
“Look at our key guys in Sandy and Pablo really taking some big steps forward and trusting their stuff,” Stottlemyre said. “We’ve talked a lot about that: Getting out of survival mode. We know with all young players, there’s that transformation and that time that you have to allow for guys to get to that point where they have the confidence that they belong in the big leagues. Both of those guys’ willingness to get in the zone and get in good counts made big strides. ... It’s time for the rest to take a step forward also.”
The new-look bullpen
On the other side of the pitching spectrum, the Marlins have once again overhauled their bullpen.
They have five new veteran additions to the relief pitcher corps in Anthony Bass, Adam Cimber, John Curtiss, Ross Detwiler and Dylan Floro. They join returners Richard Bleier, James Hoyt and Yimi Garcia.
“They throw strikes,” Stottlemyre said,” which is something we really struggled to do in our bullpen. If you look at it, there’s not a ton of swing and miss, but they’re guys that come at you and know who they are. We really deepened the depth of our bullpen.”
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