Marlins’ Edward Cabrera ‘earned the right to come here.’ He showed promise in MLB debut
He woke up confident, ready to accomplish a dream he had set his sights on a decade ago. A thought raced through his mind that Wednesday morning, acknowledging the reality.
“You’re here.”
“Let’s see what happens now,” he says to himself. “God willing, everything will come out correctly.”
Fast forward to that night. He steps from the dugout to the field with three cameras and a slew of expectations following him. He circles the loanDepot park mound, stopping briefly as his foot touches the dirt, and begins throwing warm-up pitches.
It’s time.
“It means everything to me,” Edward Cabrera, the Miami Marlins’ highly regarded pitching prospect, said a day earlier. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was a little kid, and I also know that I have a family supporting me and waiting for this moment, as well.”
And Cabrera’s debut lived up to the hype for six innings before he paid for two mistakes in the seventh innings.
His final line in Miami’s 4-3, 10-inning win over the Washington Nationals: 6 1/3 innings, four hits, three earned runs allowed, three walks and two strikeouts. Cabrera threw 78 pitches, 50 of which went for strikes.
“Edward was really, really composed for his first outing,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. “He got the strike zone. The pitch count was down. He attacked all night.”
All three runs Cabrera allowed came on a pair of seventh-inning home runs in back-to-back at-bats that momentarily gave the Nationals (54-72) a 3-2 lead.
But the Marlins (52-75) tied the game in the bottom half of the inning and Jorge Alfaro hit a walk-off single in the 10th to end the Marlins’ season-high-tying eight-game losing streak. It was Alfaro’s second walk-off hit of the season. Brian Anderson hit a home run and scored twice, and Jesus Aguilar drove in Magneuris Sierra to account for the rest of Miami’s scoring.
Of Cabrera’s 78 pitches, he threw 30 four-seam fastballs (topping out at 98.8 mph), 24 changeups, 12 curveballs and 12 sliders.
But Wednesday was just a needed first step for the 23-year-old Cabrera and one the Marlins hope he will build on over the final five-plus weeks of the regular season.
“I made my debut,” Cabrera said,” and I’m ready to continue to work.”
Breaking down the start
Cabrera, the No. 2 prospect in the Marlins’ system and the No. 30 overall prospect in baseball according to MLB Pipeline, gave the Marlins a lot to be excited about moving forward with what he did on Wednesday.
His first pitch: A 97.7 mph four-seam fastball on the lower inside corner of the strike zone to Nationals center fielder Lane Thomas. The at-bat ended with a ground ball to Brian Anderson two pitches later.
Cabrera needed just eight pitches — all strikes — to retire the side in the first inning on a pair of groundouts and a soft lineout and threw just 17 pitches to get through two innings.
He then worked around early jams.
After Luis Garcia hit a first-pitch single to right field to lead off the third, Cabrera struck out Riley Adams looking and Josiah Gray on a fouled bunt attempt with two-strikes — the first two strikeouts of his MLB career — before Bryan De La Cruz made a running grab at the wall in center field to rob Thomas of a hit. Cabrera pointed his index finger toward De La Cruz as he walked off the mound.
Cabrera said he plans to give the ball from his first strikeout to his parents and that the first strikeout is what he will remember most from his debut.
“There were a lot of emotions that happened today with the first start,” Cabrera said. “That is something that is not easy to handle. At the end of the day, all of this, I do it mostly for my family. I love my family, all the sacrifices. Everything I do is because of that. That’s the reason I go out there every five days.”
The Marlins then erased an Alcides Escobar’s infield single in the fourth, a Carter Kieboom hit-by-pitch in the fifth and an Adams walk in the sixth with double plays.
“He came out to compete,” Alfaro said. “He wasn’t afraid of anything. ... He didn’t care who stepped in the box. He went out to compete and make his pitches.”
But Cabrera’s outing unraveled in the seventh when Josh Bell and Yadiel Hernandez hit back-to-back home runs on elevated changeups. Bell’s went a projected 413 feet to straightaway center field and barely left the outfield. Hernandez’s went an estimated 396 feet to left field.
“I’m sure he has never felt anything like what he’s going to feel here, and we’re going to work through those,” Marlins pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. said. “We know he’s got great makeup, great work habits. His aptitude has been there, so there’s a lot of things that he does and brings to this level that we hope that he can kind of cut to the chase so to speak and and get through some of those roadblocks. It’s not an easy transition for guys to come up and have to go through some struggles, but we’re pretty confident with how he’s wired and things that he’s worked through.”
‘It wasn’t an easy process’
The Marlins were hoping Cabrera’s debut would have come sooner than this. Cabrera did, too. It has been his dream since he started playing at 13 years old in the Dominican Republic.
Cabrera, who signed with the Marlins as an international free agent in 2015, had a breakthrough minor-league season in 2019 and showed even more strides during spring training ahead of the 2020 season before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered MLB for four-and-a-half months.
“It was something that I wanted to do very much,” Cabrera said.
But a pair of injuries over the last two seasons delayed his call-up to the majors.
First, it was a minor shoulder injury while he was at the Marlins’ alternate training site during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. He was off the mound for a bit but rebounded to the point where he was on the Marlins’ taxi squad for their final road trip of the season and for both playoff series even though he didn’t get the call at that point.
And then he missed all of spring training this year while dealing with right biceps nerve inflammation. He didn’t make his first minor-league start until June 6, just over a month after the season began.
“It wasn’t an easy process,” Cabrera said. “It was something a little bit hard that I needed to trust my trainers and everybody in the organization. ... I put my head down and was always working hard.”
‘It’s time to give him another test’
His hard work paid off this year.
Cabrera compiled a 2.93 ERA in 13 starts spanning three minor-league levels — two with Class A Jupiter, five with Double A Pensacola and six with Triple A Jacksonville — before being told Sunday that he would be making his way to Miami. He struck out 92 batters over 61 1/3 innings in the minors, holding opponents to a .205 batting average.
“It’s time to give him another test here,” Stottlemyre said. “He’s done enough things down there and kind of pitched his way out of that level. He has earned the right to come here.”
His first test on Wednesday went well until the seventh inning. Now, the focus shifts from getting to the big leagues to figuring out what he has to do to stay in the big leagues. Assuming he stays healthy, Cabrera should get five or six more starts this season.
It’s a similar situation to the one Sixto Sanchez and Trevor Rogers were in last season.
Stottlemyre mentioned specifically how the Marlins watched how Rogers learned from his seven starts in 2020 and went into the offseason with “a better understanding of how his stuff plays at this level.” Rogers won a job in the starting rotation out of spring training for the 2021 season, became the Marlins’ lone All-Star representative and is still a contender to win the National League Rookie of the Year award despite missing the past month of the season.
Cabrera, Stottlemyre said, “needs to see that and feel that.”
“There are going to be some bumps in the road,” Stottlemyre said. “It comes with every young pitcher who’s ever gone through this level. I look forward to working through those, but this is a guy that obviously with his pitch package and what he brings — not to put too much pressure on him — but he has a chance to impact a game.”
There were glimpses of that on Wednesday. The Marlins and Cabrera hope there are more to come.
For now, Cabrera is living the dream.
This story was originally published August 25, 2021 at 9:36 PM.
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