Marlins’ Robby Snelling knows there’s room to grow after his MLB debut. His takeaways
Robby Snelling is generally his harshest critic. The left-handed pitcher, a top prospect in the Miami Marlins’ organization and across Major League Baseball, looks back at every outing with a decisive eye, trying to find every mistake — no matter how minute — and look at whatever ways he can improve upon them.
He’ll make a slight exception for his outing on Friday night.
“Today,” Snelling said postgame, “is a pretty unique situation.”
Snelling made his MLB debut Friday night and the overall outing was serviceable. He held the Washington Nationals to three runs over five innings of work, allowing five hits and four walks while striking out two in Miami’s 3-2 loss.
It’s far from Snelling’s standards. He’ll quickly admit that. He’ll make sure to correct what went wrong.
But for right now, in the immediate, he’s not letting the result put a damper on the accomplishment of making it to the big leagues.
“Try not to be too hard on myself,” Snelling said. “Look at the really good takeaways.”
All that said, there were some good takeaways but not before he hit his first rough patch.
All three runs he gave up — and both of his strikeouts — came in the first inning. He began his big-league career by striking out Nationals leadoff hitter James Wood on three pitches before giving up a hard-hit Curtis Mead double to left-center field. After getting a second strikeout, this time against Brady House, Snelling then gave up an RBI single to CJ Abrams and a two-run home run to Jacob Young. The hits by Mead and Abrams were on middle-middle breaking balls. The Young home run came on a middle-in fastball.
“Pretty frustrating when in the first inning, I feel like I can put any pitch where I want to, and that’s the inning that I got hurt on,” Snelling said.
But after that rough first inning, Snelling navigated through his final four innings of work without giving up a run despite a constant stream of traffic.
He induced two double plays. He generated his share of swing and miss — 12 whiffs on 42 Nationals swings overall. He mixed up his arsenal, going heavy on his breaking ball early instead of relying on his fastball that topped out at 97.2 mph because he anticipated that hitters would expect him to rely on his heater early in his debut.
“If this is an example of a bad start,” Snelling said, “that’s pretty good. Go back to the drawing board, throw a good bullpen this week, work on the things I need to work on — location of different pitches and tunneling different pitches — and hopefully next week’s a different outcome.”
The Marlins are hoping that’s the case, too. Snelling is ranked as the No. 2 prospect in Miami’s system and the No. 32 prospect in all of MLB, according to MLB Pipeline. He dominated at Triple A Jacksonville to begin this season, pitching to a 1.86 ERA with 44 strikeouts in 29 innings across six starts. And this was after he made a pretty strong impression during spring training, where he was one of the final roster cuts.
“The great thing about Robby is he’s really good right now ... and he still has a lot of improvement that he can make,” Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix said. “He has true top-of-the-rotation upside. We’re constantly evaluating how we can make our team better, short-term and long-term. The things that Robby’s improved at with the strike throwing, the way he’s dominated at the Triple A level, he’s shown to us that he’s ready for this.”
The outcome Friday wasn’t what Snelling or the Marlins wanted; the defeat was Miami’s sixth through eight games on this 10-game homestand.
But Marlins manager Clayton McCullough noted how Snelling “showed a lot of moxie” in his debut. “I’m sure he had all the emotions going into it,” McCullough said.
How Snelling responds to the outing will be perhaps more telling about his long-term potential.
“Obviously this is the goal,” Snelling said. “Being up here and staying up here is the goal.”
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