Amidst a flurry of injury updates and roster moves, the Seattle Mariners announced a major strategy shift for the next month. The club will employ the piggyback strategy once more, carrying through the All-Star Break in mid-July, but with a twist. Instead of limiting the piggyback to Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller, after apparent discussion and planning with the entire rotation, the club will be rotating the piggybacking through all six starters to afford each an opportunity to be stacked with another starter at some point. Reportedly, the decision (or at least the input from the rotation) was unanimously in favor of sharing the start-sharing load.
The move comes on the heels of a road trip that exposed the cracks in a six-man rotation scheme. As Ryan notes below, the numbers were not favorable for an M\u2019s rotation which was essentially asked to execute quality starts in sequence without fail and with lesser bullpen support should things go awry.<\/p>\n
Those factors aren\u2019t in a vacuum, as Seattle faced the Mets at home before traveling to hot, windy climates at Detroit, Baltimore, and the hot-hitting Washington. But the prior batch of outings featured the White Sox, traveling to blustery Kansas City, the A\u2019s in Sacramento, and then hosting a potent Diamondbacks offense. In short, a small sample in either direction.<\/p>\n
What was evident during the 4-6 road trip Seattle took was how thin their bullpen was stretched night after night. With one fewer reliever than typical, Seattle got season-worst outings by runs allowed from Emerson Hancock and George Kirby, and mixed bags from the rest of the rotation save for Bryce Miller. Injuries to long-man Cooper Criswell, as well as leverage arms Matt Brash and Andr\u00e9s Mu\u00f1oz meant trouble for the M\u2019s, as well as daunting tasks like leaving Jos\u00e9 Ferrer in for nearly 50 pitches and shuffling several Triple-A relievers in and out of town. This left the M\u2019s starters tasked with covering as many innings as possible, often at points where they might\u2019ve otherwise been pulled for ineffectiveness earlier.<\/p>\n
General Manager Justin Hollander was effusive in his praise of the rotation as individuals and a collective in terms of their selflessness and camaraderie for one another and the purpose of helping the team win.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever been around a group of starters that roots for each other like this group of starters roots for each other. So when you present a plan and tell them the sacrifice you\u2019re asking them to make is for one day in the next 30, we\u2019re gonna ask you to give up an inning for the whole group to be the best version, to help the bullpen, to help the team \u2026 it\u2019s the type of culture you want to have when you go through a rebuild and come out of it. Those are the type of people you want to have – you want to draft them, trade for them, sign them to extensions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hollander acknowledged the importance as well of having Cal Raleigh back to navigate the uncharted territory, while nonetheless praising Mitch Garver and Jhonny Pereda for their work in his absence. The ~30 day schedule built out is, per Hollander, the typical schedule the club builds out with the pitching coaches at all times, so they will reevaluate as things go, but the intent is to allow each pitcher the chance to expect and prepare for their own utilization in advance and \u201cequity\u201d with this uncommon situation.<\/p>\n
Additionally, the club reiterated that they do not currently plan to bring up Kade Anderson or Ryan Sloan in the immediate or for a relief role. They are both expected to continue building up and stretching out as starters in the minors, but both remain in consideration as potential additions late in the season as needed and merited. The first piggyback of this sort will be its most familiar members, with Luis Castillo and Bryce Miller sharing a start on Friday, and three more at least planned until the end of the season\u2019s first half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amidst a flurry of injury updates and roster moves, the Seattle Mariners announced a major strategy shift for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,357974,329592,85],"class_list":["post-743019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-seattle-mariners-news","tag-seattle-mariners-roster","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}