Jose Fernandez Gets Surprise Opportunity with Marlins
By John Parent
The Miami Marlins have a history of aggressively pushing their best young prospects and their top Minor League talent headed into 2013 is apparently no exception.
Jose Fernandez wasn’t supposed to be in the conversation when Marlins fans spoke of their rotation for the 2013 season. Though the 6’3″ right hander is ranked as the sixth-best prospectin all of baseball by this site, He’s never thrown a pitch above High-A Jupiter and has but 138 professional innings under his belt. Though Fernandez began Spring Training in big league camp, he was moved to the minor league complex early on. By all accounts, Fernandez impressed the Marlins and their staff, but he wasn’t supposed to factor into their plans until at least 2014.
Instead, thanks to a rash of late-Spring injuries and a horrible showing by expected starter Jacob Turner, Fernandez got the call to break camp with the big club and will make his Major League debut on April 7 when the Fish take on the Mets at Citi Field.
Fernandez doesn’t figure to last the season in the big league rotation, as Nathan Eovaldi and Henderson Alvarez are both expected back at some point from their DL stints that created room for Fernandez in the first place. That said, He is slated to toss somewhere between 150-175 innings this year, which is a logical jump from the 134 he tossed across 25 starts last season.
This is Miami’s best pitching prospect since Josh Beckett and one of the more highly regarded in the past handful of seasons in all of baseball. He won’t turn 21 years old until the trade deadline.
There is a school of thought that says pushing a young pitcher before he’s fully developed can wind up causing the player’s ceiling to be limited. There are many who feel that a similar situation caused a retardation of development for Rick Porcello, who made the Tigers out of camp in 2009, despite never playing above A-ball.
Porcello was certainly impressive during his rookie campaign and held down a rotation spot all season, including getting the ball in a tie-breaking Game 163 versus the Twins. In the three seasons since, however, Porcello has failed to make significant jumps in his development as a pitcher and had to earn his way into the Tigers rotation during camp this year.
Like Porcello, Fernandez is a former first-round draft pick, but he’s one that showed dominant numbers in his first real taste of pro ball. In 2012, Fernandez walked just 35 batters (2.4/9) and struck out nearly 11 batters per nine innings (158 in 134 innings). Those numbers blow away Porcello in terms of strikeouts. The Tigers righty has fanned just 5.2 per nine innings during his initial minor league season; a rate which has held true in his four big league seasons as well, though many expected that number to increase into the more respectable 7-7.5 per nine range by this point.
The Tigers leaned on Porcello in 2009 because they expected to compete and he showed himself to be the best option they had in camp that season. Fernandez is getting his opportunity for the Marlins in a drastically different situation in terms of the competitiveness of the club and will be handled differently as well. With a team that is expected to bring up the rear in the NL East, there is no reason to risk exposing Fernandez to a season’s worth of big league lumps.
Whether it be for one start or a half dozen, expect to see a glimpse of a very bight future when Fernandez takes the mound. Then expect to see him head back to Double-A and continue his development into the front-end starter the Marlins expect he will become.